A while back a friend of mine was getting frustrated with a news site he was trying to get set up in MOSS and asked me for some help. His issue seemed pretty straight-forward, he wanted to add an Announcements web part to the main page of the site but couldn't find the web part anywhere in the site's web part gallery to be added. I'm a little embarrassed to say that the solution to our problem didn't immediately come to me, but at the same time when your brain is working in a certain direction it's all too easy to overlook the simple solutions.
My first instinct was to check his site's Site Features and Site Collection Features in the Site Settings to see what was activated or deactivated. His Enterprise features were enabled, as were his Standard features and Team Collaboration features. So this wasn't a case of available functionality being disabled so that the web part couldn't be used. Next I checked the file server of our SharePoint front end server to see if the files associated with the Announcements web part had been removed, which would prevent the web part from being in the site's gallery and could not find the files I was expecting to see. It was at this point that I realize the folly of my actions and the fact that I was going about this situation all wrong.
See, I was forgetting that there is no such thing as an Announcements web part in SharePoint. "But John!" you're saying… "What about the Announcements web part that is automagically added to my site's home page any time I create a new team collaboration site?" And that's the crux of the problem…what appears to be a web part specifically for Announcements (or a Calendar, or Linkset, etc) is actually a pretty general web part that SharePoint makes available anytime you create a new list within your SharePoint site. This web part is added to your gallery to provide you with a view of your list's contents, and depending on the list template you used to create the list will format the lists contents in different ways. Links will be shown hyperlinked, Announcements will be shown with headlines and summaries in chronological order, Calendars will be shown in a standard calendar format, and so on.
My point is that to fix my friend's problem I didn't have to do anything more complex than create an Announcements list for his site; once I did that its associated web part appeared in the site's gallery and could be added to the page. This is a pretty cool but often overlooked aspect of SharePoint, anytime you create a list SharePoint will automatically create a web part for that list which allows you to view its contents from somewhere other than the list's page itself. And you can customize the data shown by that web part through the creation of custom views and filters for the list. Pretty cool, huh?
ferringer