How to display a single document library in another WSS site?

I have come across this question in many situations when project teams want to share various documents which exist in other sites or sub sites.

One way of doing this is to use the “Page Viewer” web part and add the URL of the document library page. This results in the full page and navigation elements being rendered to the Web part and is not what users want to see.

However there is a better way of doing this by using the same “Page Viewer” web part and using the “dialogview” method. The dialogview method is an RPC call that can be used to directly access to open, save and property views used by MS Office products. The dialogview method takes in three parameters

To create the document view use the “Page Viewer” web part, but instead of including the full URL to the document library create a valid call to the “dialogview” method. To do this Insert the Page Viewer web part to a WSS site. In the URL field enter the URL in the following format:

http://[Server]/[Site Path]/_vti_bin/owssvr.dll?dialogview=FileOpen&location=Shared%20Documents

Also you can pass in the location parameter with no value to show the list of all document libraries.

As you can see the navigation elements are not rendered and users can even open the documents through this view. You can also use the dialogview method in custom application that you can write to interact with WSS document libraries.

More information on Windows SharePoint Services RPC Methods can be found here.