best way to manage common lists

Question

I am fairly new to Sharepoint 2010. I was assigned a task to put a issue tracking and storage system in place. then we will expand our site hierarchy.

we have some lists which are common across the company such as Customers, Products. We will need these lists to be lookup lists in sub sites sites. I was just wondering where the best place is to put these lists in sharepoint. Is very top site the best place? Then create column which are type of these lists?

Could you give some advice to manage these list properly, please?

Many thanks

Regards

Answer 1

Wouldn't managed metadata be a better approach? http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee424402.aspx

If you do go the list route though, the best place to put it is at the root site of the collection and it will be available across all subsites. Site lookup columns can be created at the root level and will be available throughout the site collection.

Answer 2

From technical point of view, it's up to you where you'll put the lookup lists. They should be placed in the same site collection scope, so you may consider placing them on the Site Collection root of all your sub-sites. Generally it's more like design/permission plan you need to think about.

Answer 3

First you must determine which lists are going to be used on more than 1 subsite. If these lists you are mentioning (Costumers, Products) are lists that is going to be used on more than 1 subsite, put them on the root level. If not, put them on the specific subsite.