title: Sharing Data Across Sharepoint Sites - Roll Up or Pull Down?
body: <p>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.</p>
  
  <p>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:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li><p>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.</p></li>
  <li><p>Pull Down - A master list is defined in the parent and each subsite contains a view of that list, filtered </p></li>
  <li><p>Purchase or create a custom rollup webpart.</p></li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>What are your experiences in different situations? What are the tradeoffs of these techniques and are there other (good) ways I've missed?</p>
  
  <p>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.</p>