A simple addon that would allow the user to add a cross-site column to a list. All it needs is the ability to select which site to look under, which list to look under, and which column to reference. I've seen other developers create this webpart, but I don't think that you guys have one yet as simple as this.
Mike Ferrara | President
Ferrara Data Consulting
Mike,
I have passed this on to our Engineering Team to be considered for future development. Thanks for the suggestion.
Chris DooleyCommunity Manager
Hello Mike,
Have you looked at our Bamboo Selector column? It is part of the SharePoint Custom Column Pack (http://store.bamboosolutions.com/ps-75-5-sharepoint-custom-column-pack.aspx). With this custom column users can define in the configuration of the column the site where the source list and column resides:
The source List and column can reside on a different site across site collections and even Web applications! You can also select the option to Allow mulitple values to allow multiple selctions to be made. After configuring the new column, when the end-user hits the New or Edit forms, they will see either a drop down box or a list box of values. To assist in simplifying the list of options, the Bamboo Selector will only display options of distinct values to help shorten the list of options. If there is more than 20 items, instead of trying to build the entire list of options on form load (like standard SharePoint Lookup column does) the user enters the first few characters in the drop down menu field, and then a list that matches the entered characters will be displayed, improving performance dramatically.
The only drawback is since we grab only distinct (unique) values, there is no link to the lookup item form like in standard SharePoint Lookup, only a text value is stored in the column.
Does this meet what you were looking for?
**************
Jeff Kozloff
Bamboo Solutions Corporation
Now that I see this product more closely, I do believe it achieves what I'm looking for. Searching across web applications is definitely a nice feature, as others that I have seen only search across the same site collection/web app.
Thanks Jeff!