Creating a content aggregation Web Part

Providing an easy way to access the content is incredibly important, and gets more challenging over time as the amount of content in the system grows.

Content rollup approaches

There are three main content rollup approaches that can be considered:

• Content Query Web Part

• Query list data directly

• Query using SharePoint Search

In the Document Center template, there are three Content Query Web Parts (CQWP) that are pre-configured. The CQWP can work great in smaller sites, but has two real limitations; it cannot work across site collections and it does not perform well with very large sets of content. So even if this solution were altered to locate all of the sites and libraries within a single site collection, it is very likely that the solution would fail eventually. Performance is even more critical because those content rollups are typically placed on the main landing pages that all users will see as they enter the system.

A second option is to query all...