Using Site Columns to lookup information across sites in Sharepoint 2007

I shared a couple of links with fellow AMITPRO member James Cash earlier this week but thought it would also be worth a blog post as i don’t post enough about SharePoint.

A limitation of the previous version of Sharepoint  (WSS 2.0) when using lookup fields was that it could only lookup information on that specific site

This was a pain if you had information that you may need to reference in different sites

For example

I have a site that handles call logging, a site that holds customer documentation, a site i use for billing, etc,etc

If i needed column to store customer information (out of the box) you had to create a customer list on every site. As you can imagine when you needed to change the customer list you had to make the changes in every instance of that list

Thankfully the latest version of SharePoint can get around this (WSS 3.0)

In the top level site i created my customers list with all the fields i needed (name, address,tel no, etc)

I then clicked the “site settings” option and clicked “Site Columns”

Then create a new site column, give it a name and select the lookup option

(Set the Group it as you see fit, i usually create my own group for columns i have created)

Set the “get information from” field to the customer list

Set the “In this column” field to the customer name field and save the new site column

The list is still stored in the top-level site but any sub-sites will have access to the site column which has access to the data!

(click the “add from existing site columns” when you want to add it to a list or library)

This isn’t new so i’m not going to claim any credit here!

I also found these posts explained it well

http://www.sharepointblogs.com/dortiz/archive/2008/01/24/leveraging-the-use-of-site-columns-part-i.aspx

http://www.sharepointblogs.com/dortiz/archive/2008/02/27/leveraging-the-use-of-site-columns-part-ii.aspx

There is also a solution that allows you to do with without having to setup site columns here though i haven’t tried this out yet (requires sign-up)

Hope this is of help to someone!