Single location to view All documents in different document libraries

Hi,

We have the following requirement:

MOSS users want to have one place (it could be Links list or document library or a custom web part) where they can see all new content published to some specific document libraries. These document libraries could be in a single site or across multiple sites.

Q. Is there any out-of-the-box feature available that I can use to achieve the above

At present, I'm thinking of the following two solutions .. don't know how much they are feasible, so looking for your opinions

1. Is it possible to have some custom search property for document library. I can save a search (in my links) where document library custom property is one of the required doc libraries. This would at least show all the documents in all relevant document libraries. If there is some metadata for finding if a document is new (the logic that shows new TAG against newly added doc in a library) - we can also add that to custom search property to get the wanted results

2. Write a custom links list that would find all new documents in all relevant doc libraries and show them as links. Possiblle Again - how do we find if a document is newly added

Any help would be appreciated

Cheers

Sanjay

SharePoint Products and Technologies3

Two suggestions:

Use content types:
Declare a content type for those document libraries, and the use a content query web part to search the entire site collection for all documents of that content type.
Use custom meta data:
Define a custom field (like I see you are doing) in all the libraries, and use a content query web part to search the entire site collection for all documents which that custom field equals to "true" (for example)

The solutions above both use the Content Query Web Part which is only availalbe if you have MOSS and not just WSS (which you indicate that you do have).

If you dont, you can purchase a 3rd party web part (search google for "aggregation web part") that does similar functionality.

Ishai,

Thanks so much for your suggestion - yes both of these should get us the desired result.

What i was thinking, isn't containing doc library or containing item available as metadata that we can use What i mean is if doc1 is in a doc library 2, WSS knows that always that doc1 is in doc library 2 - how does it know Isn't there any metadata tag for that - which we can also use in content query web part

Sanjay

Dear Ishai and Sanjay,

I'm struggeling with the content query web part. We created a custom meta-tag field 'customer number'. This meta field is added to three documents libraries and one record library (records center). The content query is setup to display all documents content types from the entire site where 'customer number' contains '0001'. Unfortenatly it only shows documents from the documents libraries and not from the record libraries.

When we change the scope of the content query to display documents form the records library only (/records) than it works fine. When we remove the 'customer number' filter all documents, from both documents libraries and record libraries are displayed.

Can you help me out