Most of the time when people complain that a Microsoft product doesn't work the way they think it should (and often complain that the people involved haven't a clue), I tend to think the people making the complaint are the ones who haven't a clue.

Being an MVP doesn't get you very far inside the MS tent, but at least close enough to realise that people who are inside that tent are trying to make the best products they can and that usually things that are missing (or not done the way the rest of us think they should be done) are the results of design decisions - i.e. they often *have* thought of the thing that we see as missing but decided for good (to them) reasons  not to include that functionality.

However occasionally they get it very wrong and in my opinion the worst cases of this are when they remove functionality in a later version that was in an earlier version of the same product (even if that product name has been changed in the meantime to confuse us and maybe make it seem it isn't the same product).

One good example of both of these last two points comes in SharePoint Designer 2007 (which - for SharePoint uses - is the follow-up product to Front Page 2003).

Whereas when you used Front Page 2003 to create a Data View Web Part (DVWP), you had access to all the SharePoint Lists on the same *server*, using SharePoint Designer 2007 you only have access to SharePoint Lists in the same *site collection* on that server.

I think discussion of this started in a thread in a SharePoint public newsgroup where I suggested using SPD 2007 to create a DVWP from any list on the server (based on FP 2003 experiences of doing just this) only for the person asking the question to come back and say this didn't work for sites in another site collection).

Now we have a blog post from Monty (the same guy as in the newsgroup, perhaps?) on this, complete with a reference to a basic MS page saying which SharePoint Lists you can add to a "Data Source Library" where it clearly states ". If the other site is in a different site collection, you can still access all of the other data sources, but not SharePoint lists and libraries."

That Monty blog (with that reference) is here:

http://www.sharepointblogs.com/mcotw/archive/2007/11/07/No-longer-able-to-create-a-DVWP-with-a-datasource-that-pulls-data-from-another-site-collection.aspx

What I'd like to know (but probably never will) is just what was the "design reason" in this case? SPD 2007 is a product that covers an awful lot more than FP 2003 ever did (making it more difficult to use, incidentally), so why, oh why, REMOVE functionality - and what's more, functionality that was easy to use? Yes, even for me.