Maintaining Offline List Content from Multiple Sites

Abstarct

The collaboration sites of Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) provide a focused workspace for users to share information to achieve a goal or complete a process. Often these sites are customized by an organization so they meet the exact needs of the type of collaboration the group of users is trying to perform. Usually each site represents a specific instance of the process and has the appropriate lists and libraries to store the necessary information. Though the site adequately services the needs to the group for the specific instance of the process, it does very little for the user who may be involved in many of these sites. Even though each site has the same type of content, the user would be burdened with accessing each site during the day to make content changes. A better solution would be to consolidate the content from these similar sites into a single tool for the user. There the user could maintain the content for all of the sites and periodically save her changes back to the corresponding lists in SharePoint sites. Ideally the tool would also provide this information in a way that supports visualization techniques such as charting. In this chapter we will detail how, as a developer, you can extend Microsoft Excel to construct such a tool. In fact, we will make the list data available to the user even if she is offline and not able to reach the SharePoint sites.