In the top-level SharePoint list views I often order items by the "Last Updated" column. Corresponding xml fragment of the list schema.xml looks like <View BaseViewID="0" Type="HTML" ContentTypeID="0x012001">... <Query> <OrderBy> <FieldRef Name="DiscussionLastUpdated" Ascending="FALSE"> </FieldRef> </OrderBy> </Query> </View> When a SPList contains large number of items it is also vital to define "Last Updated" as indexed column to keep having good ......