I need to...
No, this is not a post about whiney kids or whiney adults, but rather a new web part in SharePoint 2007 called "I need to...". If you look on the home page of a newly created MOSS site you may have noticed this web part with the single entry called "Create MySite" (which may or may not work). You may be wondering what this is and how to use it.
First, it another way of presenting links to other areas that people may need to get to. You could use the links web part but this looks better, at least in my opinion. Second, in order to use it you can either use the default settings (which I personally do not like) or create a custom list and add entries to that list.
If you wish to use the custom list route, create a custom list that contains the Title (always created by default), a field to hold URLs (I call it URL) and finally a field that allows choices that will be used to filter the entries. This MUST be a field of type "choice" although you can allow multiple selections in it. I usually just create a field and have either "Yes" or "No" (with "Yes" as the default) as the choices. Using a "Yes/No" field will not work either though it is kind of like a choice field.
Add your entries to this list and add the "I Need to..." web part to your page. You will then need to modify its settings to use the new list (and any other settings you want...I typically change the name from "I Need to..." to "I want to...").
The first step to is to click on the "Change...:" button to select the list that will be used to populate your control. Find the list you just created and select it. Then in the "Filter Field" drop down, select your choice field and finally in the "Filter Value" drop down, select the value of the items you want to show. You may also need to adjust the width so that all the text shows up in the web part's drop down list.
Click OK and test it out. One final hint: When entering the URL for your choices, if you enter the relative path it will work for both the internal and external users. For example, if I want to redirect the users to the Search page, I would type in "/SearchCenter/Pages/default.aspx" rather than the entire URL.