Sharing Data Across Sharepoint Sites - Roll Up or Pull Down?

Question

My workplace will be starting to use Sharepoint internally during the coming months. I'm pretty excited about the possibilities of having more structured data on our intranet. A key part of this is allowing related data to be spread across the site hierarchy.

I'm currently experimenting with a list of Committee Members, with the idea that somewhere on the site you could see a list of everyone on every committee. Then in other parts of the site, you only want to see members of a single committee. From the various articles and blog posts I've been reading, it seems like there are three accepting ways to approach this:

1. Roll Up - Subsites have their own lists (optionally from a list template). Content types are used so the instances can be collected into a Data View Web Part on the parent site.

2. Pull Down - A master list is defined in the parent and each subsite contains a view of that list, filtered

3. Purchase or create a custom rollup webpart.

What are your experiences in different situations? What are the tradeoffs of these techniques and are there other (good) ways I've missed?

BTW, the committee members example is what I'm currently experimenting with to try out different possibilities. I'm more interested in the general tradeoffs, not necessarily specific to this example.

Answer 1

I would say that both will work equally well but the advantages of one over the other really come down to whats more convinent for how you'll have your intranet site collection structured.

Answer 2

You might also want to consider using the Content Query Web Part (CQWP) in combination with a complimentar site collection structure so that you can surface the committee member data.

With a little customization, the CQWP can do some amazing things - and it has been fully optimized under the hood by the product group team for managing all kinds of queries. It's easy to configure and use, and there are plenty of examples on how to use them on the web.

Answer 3

Having done this a number of times on different sites, for your situation, I recommend:

1.Roll Up - Subsites have their own lists (optionally from a list template). Content types are used so the instances can be collected into a Data View Web Part on the parent site.

This gives more flexibility, not only can other sites in your site collection get this information, you can use the search query webpart to roll up the information in other site collections (the CQWP and DVWP do not work across site collections).

The only time I have used a Pull Down model is when there logically is only one list that I site collection will go to. Such lists for us have always been functional in nature, e.g. A list of content query definitions for a some custom functionality or a list of customers that ALL sites rely on and is used to populate an installed custom field control.