SharePoint Admins – You Dont Want to Miss This

  The RSSBus SharePoint Web Part might just be the most exciting thing I’ve had the pleasure to work with in quite a while.  RSSBus is an amazingly powerful product, but the RSSBus SharePoint Web Part…its just a thing of beauty.

What the web part does:  it lets you expose data from just about anywhere inside SharePoint. The simplest example is to show an RSS feed like Google News or Yahoo News.  I tweeted about that last week. 

I put together two more simple examples.  One is using my Twitter Search RSS feed – as you can see from the screen shot below its just the search.twitter.com RSS feed of “PowerShell”.  The Web Part itself allows the user to supply inputs for the number of results to show and the query to use in the search.

But the real power?  That comes when you use the “Connectors” – these Connectors get data from all sorts of data sources like web services, Excel documents, CRM systems, databases, email and other Internet servers, office applications, and tons more.

For my next simple example, I used the SQL Connector to display the results of a SQL query in SharePoint (this sample query is a list of product downloads from a website).  The template itself just includes a call to the SQL Connectors "sqlQuery" operation, and passes it a connection string and select string.  Then I just output the results in an html table.  The whole thing is like 8 lines of template code plus basic HTML.

A beta of the RSSBus SharePoint Web Part is available for download, give it a try and let me know your thoughts!