Saved my bacon many times - Lightning Tools Lightning Conductor
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
1) We have an information architecture whereby Fire Stations and other departments such as Finance and HR have individual SharePoint team sites and yet need to collaborate on SharePoint Lists that lie outside of their individual team sites. Rather than expect all users to navigate to the master SharePoint List (in a new tab) and navigate to information relevant to their department via a user driven filter or pre-defined views via the Ellipses (which is hard to train and for non educated/casual users), we instead create a SharePoint page on their respective team sites and use Lightning Tools Lightening Conductor to re-create a SharePoint List view bespoke to their department or Fire Station via Lightning Tools. This provides the user with a fluid experience of interacting with a 'master list' without leaving their site and retains the look/feel/navigation of their site. 2) We also use it to show 'alerts' on home pages of SharePoint sites to newly created content on SharePoint List based on the conditions and formatting capabilities of Lighting tools. An example would be that if a new item was added to a SharePoint list to say a Crewing Department was Active, then this alert would show up as Green on the relevant site's homepage, if not the alert would show up in Red with text saying 'Offline' . We also roll up SP Calanders to display a view of all meetings 'Today' which is displayed on a TV screen in our reception Area.
Pros
- Enables Grouped Views
- Conditional Formatting
- Very intuitive Interface
- Robust Product proven over many years
Cons
- The ability to 'Add' an item link (we do this manually at the moment by adding a hyperlink with redirect to source page.
- The ability to 'Delete an item' without it defaulting to the master list
- Bring back the model window interface rather than opening in new tab, although I appreciate this is M365 issue and not Lightning tool
- The Conditional formatting is not very clear, took me ages to get this right, but when I cracked it, it was awesome
- The IF/OR filtering is harder now than on the original product when you could do this all-in-one on the original on prem version, now there is only one condition you can apply to a single column without referring it against a second column at the same time (no logic cross reference). I have worked around this, but I preferred it when I could do it all in one go.
Likelihood to Recommend
Having experience of SharePoint On Premise and also SharePoint Online, there isn't an out of the box app/webpart that enables you to 'roll up content' from a variety of source's (in my case SP Lists, but there are many other data sources it works with) across site collections with an easy to use and intuitive interface which is what Lightning tools excels at.
