The users wanted to be able to expand/collapse the data based on a header value (in this case employee).  So an employee is shown in the panelbar headers while the items are orders, and the details of those orders.  I don't think an html select element can do all of this unless it was repeated many times, and then that's really defeating the reason I'm using a Kendo widget.

If the user wants to select multiple items and then perform some action , say from a button on the header.  This can probably be achieved by adding a class to the line in the "select" callback on the panelbar, but would be a nice feature to have in the product as a standard option.

I don't know of other widgets that support this, but I really haven't looked around. We are trying to stick with Kendo widgets as our first choice.