Announcements in SharePoint are a great way to let your team members know what’s going on. But are all announcements appropriate for everyone in your organization? Or would you like to make everyone aware of some announcements which are buried in a Team Site? Both of those scenarios are where SharePoint rollup Announcements would make sense.
Using SharePoint’s Content Query Web Part, you could roll up Announcements from anywhere within the current Site Collection, and display them in a basic format. Using the default settings (except for removing the default entry in the Link field, which will otherwise error):
Here’s what you’ll see:
Of course, you can jazz that display up quite a bit with custom XSL styling… if you know how to do that.
If you wish to roll up SharePoint Announcements from multiple Site Collections, you could use SharePoint’s Content Search Web Part. This assumes you have the Enterprise version of SharePoint. I’ve chosen some very basic out-of-the-box settings in the Search Query and in the Web Part’s properties, as shown below:
Here’s the result of the above settings:
Again, you can make this look much nicer by applying a custom Display Template. That is, you can edit HTML for the Control Template and the Item Template. See Search-driven Web Parts and Display Templates for information about how this works. Note also that while the results can be aggregated from a larger scope than the current Site Collection, items are only available if SharePoint Search has crawled them.
Or… you could use the Lightning Conductor, the flexible, easy-to-use content rollup web part from Lightning Tools! To do a SharePoint Online Announcements rollup from within the current Site Collection, you can use the default Object Model rollup provider, as shown below.
You can easily select the scope of the rollup via a treeview of your Site Collection. Below, I’ve highlighted the Customer Demonstration Site Collection, to display items from the root site. I’ve also ticked the checkbox to the left, which will automatically roll up items from all subsites (including sites created in the future). I’ve selected the Announcements List Type, so only items from Announcements lists will be aggregated. I could also select a specific Content Type if I wished. But as I’ve already selected the Announcements List Type, and my items are of the default Announcements Content Type, there’s no need to select a specific Content Type.
On the Columns tab of the Lightning Conductor Add-in configuration, you can easily select any out-of-the-box SharePoint Announcements columns, or any custom columns you’ve created. You do this by simply by ticking the checkbox, and dragging the columns into the order in which you wish them to be displayed. Compare this to the Content Query Web Part, which allows only a few columns in the default view, and requires you to choose the correct column from a list of every single SharePoint column. Below, I’ve also selected to sort by the Modified date, with the newest item at the top. In addition, I’ve set a filter on the Modified date column, such that only Announcements modified within the past 30 days are displayed.
Using the Lightning Conductor, you can also easily format the display without needing to write XSL or HTML code. Below, I’ve selected a US “Short Date” format for the Modified date; other formats can also be entered. I changed the column heading of the Parent Web Title to “Site” (to show the subsites from which the Announcements are being rolled up). I’ve also specified to display HTML in the Announcement Body so fonts and images will be displayed.
And here are the results of just those few moments’ work with the Lightning Conductor:
You can also enhance the display further by using custom XSL. But as you can see, there’s a lot you can do without needing to write custom code.
The Lightning Conductor also allows you to do SharePoint rollup Announcements across Site Collections. With the Lightning Conductor Add-in for SharePoint Online, you would use the Lightning Conductor’s Search rollup provider. With the Lightning Conductor Web Part for SharePoint on-premises (2007, 2010, 2013, or 2016), it’s simply a matter of selecting to ‘Show items from multiple Site Collections’ – or any scope up to and including the entire Farm.
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