Global Lists

Team Foundation Server work item types and any information they contain are specific to a particular development project. Sometimes, however, a work item needs to reflect information that is universal to a development team or organization. In this case, global lists can be used to provide a single source of data to work items across a Team Foundation Server.

Many organizations have global information that needs to be shared among development projects. For example, an e-commerce retail company might want to use work items to relate pages in their e-commerce application to product categories. This can be challenge if the list of categories changes over time. Global lists solve this problem by providing a single list that can be referenced by work items in any project across a Team Foundation Server. When an update is made to the global list, it is automatically reflected in any work item that refers to it.

Global lists are stored as XML files on the server. To view this feature, open the XML file for a global list in an XML editor, or open a work item that refers to a global list.