I have a desire to create the same custom field across many products/product lines. If I use the same field name, then when I try to do reports, it is pretty much impossible to include the custom field in a column or as a filter, because you see the same custom field name repeated in a list for each product or product line it is defined for. There is no way to know which one of those fields to choose because they are the same name. If you use the same name on a custom field in different product lines, then when adding columns/filters in reports, you should only see that as a choice once, and it should be smart enough to include it regardless of where it is from. As it is custom fields seem kind of worthless from a reporting perspective.
We need this at the enterprise level!
I have reopened this idea. We are working on some improvements to custom fields which will also achieve the goal you are describing. You will be able to have different sets of values for each product.
We're experiencing very very similar to what Michal Anderson was describing.
We needed a way to share a custom field name between various product lines, but each product line needs access to a different set of available tags or selectable lists.
For example, we want to track the Requesting Customer as well as the Module that Ideas or Features apply to. However, those lists of Requesting Customers and Modules will be completely distinct between different product lines. As it stands, we simply duplicated the API key and Name each time and will just never promote the custom field to our top level product line. We did this as there was no way to promote a custom field and then have different lists for different children product lines or products.
Should I create a new idea for my comment or is that not something you're likely to implement?
We need this capability to do meaningful reporting at the portfolio level. It looks like this idea was flagged "likely to implement". What does that mean exactly? Is this something that we can expect to see implemented soon, or do we need to start working on a work around outside the system?
I'd love to expand on this idea and say.... I'd like to create a custom field at the product line or company level that I can use across products and product lines. In addition, I want to customize what that field contains (if it's a tag field or score card or other predefined field type) within each of those products or product lines. I'm running into this issue now where I've created a scorecard to give a WAG on development hours, however, each of my development teams has different makeups and the way they estimate is slightly different. Having one field called 'Initial Estimate' and then defining across my product lines would be uber handy!
We really want the ability to share custom fields across products lines overall.
Yes, we need this too!