Hi

I want to be able to retrieve information from a central list from my entire site collection... Suppose I create a list of all employees, how can I access it through the lookup function from another site in my site collection? Within the same site, this works perfect, but I don't know how to make it accessible to other sites in the site collection, or even from other site collections...

Anyone an idea?

Thanks in advance!!

Tom

For user lists the UPS is generally the best way to go, on the other hand that's not always an option.

For work within a site collection you can create the list at the root site, then consume it in child sites. That will work with Content By Query web parts as it did in 2010. With 2013 you could also use Content By Search Webparts which will work irrespective of where the list is in your farm.

Or if it's nice and simple you could use a SharePoint group, they are shared across the entire site collection.

A bit more info on what you want to do may help us help you.

Assuming you are wanting to work with a simple list of users, and not all users from a group or user profile services...

1. Create the list in the top level site of your site collection.
2. Create a new Site Column (Settings, Site Settings, Site Columns) as a Lookup column using your new list.
3. Add that Site Column where needed in all of your subsites.

If you want a list available across all Site Collections, then add a Managed Metadata Term Set and add Managed Metadata columns to your lists.

If you want a subset of your users, create a Group, add the users, add a Person or Group column and select "Choose from, SharePoint Group" and your group.

Hi Tom,

SharePoint Search is one of the good way to do this in 2013.

Here are some walkthroughs: http://www.sharepointnutsandbolts.com/2012/10/using-content-search-web-part-and.html

Apart from the Content search webpart functionality, SharePoint 2013 Product Catalog feature is also implemented to achieve this kind of functionality where we can have solution for publishing content from a single location out to multiple site collections. Check the below link that describes step by step.

http://www.abelsolutions.com/totm/publishing-content-to-multiple-sites-manage-from-a-single-location/

Thanks for the replies! I will look into them during the following days...

I used the employee list as an example... In reality it's a list of courses, with their course number, teachers, start and end dates, start and end time, location, classroom,... We use the data from this list in many circumstances and want to retrieve this data in forms, columns in other lists...

An example: Suppose we need to change the starting hour of a course, then we need to fill in a form to apply for this change... In the form, people just select the course number, fill in the changed value and all the rest (teacher, location,...) of the data is automatically looked up in the courses list... I can do this if the list is in the same site, but don't know yet how to do this if the form is in another site...

Kind regards

Tom