SharePoint lookup column across site-collection boundary

Question

The basic situation is that I have a list of company contacts that exist in one site that I would like to share. The contacts are referenced from a list within that site, and I would also like to be able to reference them from a list in another site collection. Lookup columns can only lookup values from a list within a site, but this is the functionality that I would like across site collections.

Is there a common solution to this sort of requirement?

Answer 1

You will need custom code for this, but since the amount is minimal and this is Stack Overflow I assume that won't be a problem. You will want to make your own listview web part that queries the list using ListViewByQuery. An example can be found here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ramg/archive/2009/04/21/implementing-a-simple-cross-site-collection-list-view-webpart.aspx

Answer 2

The SharePoint GUI only supports lookup columns in the current site. But if you create a normal lookup programmatically, or use one of many free cross-site lookup columns you can point across sites in the same site collection. I don’t think this will help you with "cross site collection"-lookups, but in case you can change your requirement to multiple sites in the same site collection and break permissions instead, it will solve your problem.

Answer 3

There are lot of solutions which can solve cross-site Lookup, including third party tools and code. But cross-site collection lookup solution is strange to me. I googled out this blog tough, maybe it useful to you.http://sharepointsolutions.blogspot.com/2006/11/free-custom-cross-site-lookup-column.html