SharePoint 2010: View tasks/list items from child sites

Question

Our client, who runs a business that oversees a group of shops, would like to set up an intranet site, with this basic structure:

• A main landing/info site
  • Child site for shop 1
    • Child site for project 1
    • Child site for project 2
    • Child site for project n
  • Child site for shop 2
    • Child site for project 1
    • Child site for project 2
    • Child site for project n

Each "project" site will have its own task list and calendar.

The question is, he would like to have an "executive view" that would allow executives to see a "merged" master task list and calendar that would include all tasks and calendar events from all active projects, in a single view.

In SharePoint 2010, what is the easiest way to implement this? Are there third-party controls that already provide this type of rollup view?

Answer 1

There are things that do this within SharePoint already.

Provided all sites are within one Site Collection, and you're not just using SharePoint Foundation, the Content Query Web Part is a good option (it's part of the Publishing Infrastructure, so you'll have to turn that on to get it). It'll query and retrieve all sorts of items; you could use it for both. You do have to fiddle with it to display things as you want; by default it just shows 'Title', but it can do a lot more.

Alternatively, you could write your own web part - the CQWP is really just a front end on the SPSiteDataQuery class - you can use that to do the data retrieval and do your own front end.

For user tasks specifically, to show all tasks belowing to the current user, you could also use this tip from Waldek Mastykarz - Inconvenient User Tasks Web Part and how to make it display all tasks - though it might not be relevant in your case.

Finally, there are 3rd party options - I reviewed some of the options for SharePoint 2007 a while back.

Answer 2

My initial thought is to have a single task list with a property that indicates which project it belongs to. The project sites then get a filtered task list, and the manager sees the whole list.