The guys at Lightning Tools have been busy responding to many customer requests for the popular Lightning Conductor Web Part (LCWP). The LCWP is very similar to the Content Query Web Part that comes with MOSS. The advantage of the LCWP is that it is capable of rolling up SharePoint content from across multiple site collections within a web application. You can also choose the columns that you wish to display rather than add columns by writing XML code as with the CQWP.
The new features in this release include:
- Calendar View – When rolling up Calendar lists or Task lists
- Limit items returned
- Select a site and automatically include all subsites
- Turn on/off tagging within html columns
- Audience Targeting improved
- Improved performance
- Quick Filter Toolbar issue
- Improved Documentation
Calendar View – When rolling up items from calendars or task lists, instead of displaying your results in a grid view, you can now display them in a Calendar which offers day/week and month views. Tasks are also colour coded according to the status.
Limit Items Returned – This feature is useful if you wish to display a subset of results such as the 10 latest Announcements.
Select a Site and include Subsites – We offer many options when aggregating content such as Rroll up from all site collections, specific site collections, specific sites, and specific lists.. In the previous release you had to manually select each Site to be included if you didn’t want to roll up from entire Site Collections. This meant having to manually add new sites to the LCWP every time a new subsite was created. This is now automated by simply choosing a URL and including all subsites.
Turn on or off tagging – In SharePoint lists such as announcements, the description column can contain tags. These tags used to display in the LCWP such as <div>. We have addressed this issue by allowing the tags to be turned on or off.
Audience Targeting Improved – The Audience Targeting has been bought inline with the CQWP audience targeting. So both web parts offer the same functionality and improved performance.
Improved Performance – We have improved the performance of the aggregation by fine tuning the queries that are performed by the LCWP.
Quick Filter Toolbar issue – The quick filter toolbar allows your users to apply filtering via the web part. If you had multiple instances of the web part on the page, these feature did not work properly. This issue has now been fixed.
Improved Documentation – The installation guide will take you through the exact steps to get you started and includes all the new features.
The above features and bug fixes were bought to our attention by our customers. We always welcome any feedback you have to offer on any of our web parts and tools so that we can continue to offer improved functionality.
You can download the Lightning Conductor Web Part trial from: https://lightningtools.com//pages/lightning-conductor-web-part.aspx
