Custom list for use in subsites

Question

Environment - we have the SharePoint that comes with Team Foundation Server. We have a top level project overview site and beneath that we have subsites for all our projects. We have been using the project template that comes with the installation.

We want to add some common features to all the subsites. We have several custom lists which we don't want to recreate for every subsite.

Is there a way that we can have these custom lists as templates?

Note that we don't want to share information from the lists, we just want to add the list and all of its custom fields as a blank list for each subsite.

I am aware that we could create a site template, but this wouldn't work for all the sites we have already set up.

The way I see it working is something like when navigating to Site Contents and clicking on add an app then our custom lists would appear in the list of apps available for adding.

I'm new to SharePoint (old at everything else), so please be gentle, there may be an obvious answer I haven't discovered yet.

Answer 1

Each SharePoint site collection has list galleries. You can upload a list template into the gallery and it will become available on all sub sites.

To do that, first create the list. Then open list settings and select "Save list as template". Choose to not include content. This will create the list template in the gallery.

Now you can go to any of the sub site and select Add App. And you can choose the new template you created.

Answer 2

Personally, I would export the list as a .cmp file and import to all locations you wish to provision it. See this Technet article for more information.