Tasks Roll up across Farm, site collection

Question

We have OOTB "task lists" in many sites used by the same set of users.

We have a farm with "x" site collections and "x" sites with-in them without any changes to the default content type.

We would like to roll up the pending tasks and show it in a single web part placed in default portal page.

What would be best way to do this task rollup when we have multiple site collections.

Other Details: Security is driven by AD groups placed in SP groups.

Answer 1

You should use Search for this task - it's the fastest and most efficient way. Only downside is a slight update delay (until it's incrementally indexed agina).

Answer 2

There are a few products in the market that currently do this, for example Lightning Conductor by Lightning Tools: http://www.lightningtools.com/lightning-conductor-2010-web-part.aspx. This tool (I think) can even rollup across web applications too.

Answer 3

There are different choices:

1. Search - not percise
2. Cycle over site collections with SPSiteDataQuery
3. Pre-aggregation to root site in each site collection with cycle over site collections

Main problem in query over sitecollection - each site collectiom can be in different Content Database, witch can be on a different server.

Answer 4

Im on the search wagon here.

A way of avoiding the the indexing delay, you could build your own custom federated search web part that looks at SharePoint through the API (SPSiteDataQuery)

Answer 5

Here is a Good free Option with some configurabiity:

SharePoint User Toolkit: Tasks Lists Roll-up for SharePoint 2010