SharePoint Content Roll-Up on Cloud - Breaking the Silos

SharePoint is a great platform of sharing the information and collaborating in between the business units. When t is not planned carefully or some basic functions are not in place information silos can occur. After a while you end up finding your organization's information isolated to each department and not sharing necessary information between the departments.

There are many ways of breaking the silos in the enterprise using SharePoint. One of the ways of breaking the silos are using the famous "Content Query" web part.  Content Query web part placed on any page but it can render the data from different sources as such, different sites, libraries, lists, and content types. You can also filter the information in many ways.

The Content Query web part is one of the most powerful web parts comes handy with out-of-the-box SharePoint. I will  try to demonstrate how easy it is to use Content Query web part to break the silos on the Cloud (Office365).

Scenario: Soutech have Team Collaboration site for each departments. Corporate communications department publishes announcements and documents that will be consumed by other departments.

Soutech Departments:

• Corporate Communications
• Operations
• Sales
• Finance
• Customer Support
• IT

Before we start make sure to enable SharePoint Server Publishing on both at the Site Collection and on the sub-sites. If you are wondering how to do it, just follow the link http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint-server-help/enable-publishing-features-HA010378243.aspx

First of all we need to create a site column for Soutech Departments. And add this column to Corporate communications Announcements. This is how it looks like after adding the site column to announcements list.
 

And then we need to enable "SharePoint Server Publishing " feature at the site collection level as well as at the each site level.

Now it is time to set our Content Query Web part for department sites. Let's do it for Corporate Communications first. We go to home page of Corporate Communications site and start editing the home page. Then select insert -> More web parts and then select the "Content Query" web part. Let's edit the web part.

Once we have done setting up the web part. Here is the result.  We can repeat same scenario into different departments and have them receive the announcements relative to their department.

I hope you'll enjoy the benefits of The Content Query web part while utilizing your Office365 on the Cloud.