Day 46... hang in there, only a few craptastic posts left until Christmas!
The Problem
It's not so much a problem, but a common scenario that is just crying out for some out-of-the-box support. Often in our taxonomies and data models we have the need for a drop-down or choice list where the lookup values should, are, and will always be consistent across the organisation. For example, selection of a region, or specific office for a global organisation.
Now, this sort of field cries "Site Column", but in a server farm with more than a single site collection, this won't necessarily be satisfactory. Unless you use one of the "workarounds" below, you're forced to duplicate your lookup lists (or if you're naughty, choice field lists) in multiple places.
Possible Solution
Introducing Candidate One for your consideration... the Server Site Column. This puppy is defined in Central Administration and then available to every single site collection in the farm. This would definitely allow you to have a global Choice field... though lookups (which is what we really want, so we can get version control and other features around the lookup values) would be a little trickier. If Server Site Columns could lookup lists defined in Central Administration and this data would remain available (and perhaps even cached for performance) in each site collection, that would be super.
Candidate Two would be some sort of "Global Lookup" concept, whereby the columns would still be defined at each Site Collection, but would retrieve data from either "central choice lists" in Central Administration, or perhaps even via extending lookups to be capable of peeking across Site Collection boundaries. Either way, it would need to be simple for users to generate and then link in one of these globally managed lists.
Workarounds (For Now)
Here's just a few ways to achieve this:
- Build or buy a cross-site Lookup column capable of retrieving its data from a list in Central Administration.
- Build or buy a replication tool/scheduled job/workflow that would allow Lookup values to be specified in a central location, and then push those changes out to a local copy in the site collections that require it.
- Re-archiect your farm to use a single Site Collection. (Yes, I'm joking!)
:) Matt