Showing Recent Document Changes Using CQWP
Let’s say you have a group of SharePoint 2010 based product sites (all under a single parent site, Products, and all using the same site template). Each site has a document library for product-specific documentation. Wouldn’t it be great to have one view, on the parent Products site, which shows all product documents that have been added or modified in the last week? Here’s how:
1. Drop a Content Query Web Part (CQWP) into a web part zone and edit its properties
2. Under ‘Query’
a. Set Source to be ‘show items from the following site and all subsites’ equal to your parent site
b. Set Show items from this list type to ‘Document Library’
c. Set Show items of this content type group to ‘Document Content Types’
d. Set Show items of this content type to ‘Document’
e. Under Additional Filters
i. Set Show items when to ‘Modified’ – ‘is greater than or equal to’
ii. Set Custom Value or Query to -7 (this will look back 7 days from today)
3. Under ‘Presentation’
a. Set Group items by to ‘Site’
b. Under Styles, set Item style to ‘Bulleted title’
4. Click OK at the bottom of the web part properties pane to enact changes
This should show all documents, grouped by site (in this case Product) that have been added or edited in the past 7 days… aggregated nicely in one place… All of this possible with a little CQWP configuration and good information architecture.