From KC Lemson's weblog, a solution to a frequently asked SharePoint question:

Publish a web part on your sharepoint site that can be dynamically consumed inline by other sites

The Exchange team uses sharepoint portal server for a lot of things, such as storing & tracking documents & lists & whatnot. As the release manager, I own the site that has the master schedule on it. There are other teams that used to have a schedule listed separately on their own sites. I wanted them to consume my web part rather than repeating the content, so that if/when the schedule changes, they don't need to update theirs (or worse yet, leave it stale and confuse someone).

*Linking to my web part is one option, but that's not inline in their sites, so it's not as nice of an interface. Exporting my web part as a template for them to import will only give them a copy of it at that point in time. *

Thankfully, MVP & sharepoint guru Sig clued me in on how to do this. My site is http://mysharepointserver/sites/site1. I have a web part that I want to expose inline in http://mysharepointserver/sites/site2's content. Here's how the manager of site2 can do this*:*

  1. Open up site2 in frontpage 2003. Make sure you have the default.aspx open in the page view.
  2. On the task pane, choose “Find Datasource“ (click the down arrow near the top of the task pane to see it)
  3. Enter the URL http://mysharepointserver/sites/site1 and the name of the web part you want to reference
  4. Drag/drop the result to the desired location on your site and save changes

It works wonderfully. Thanks so much, Sig!