The Problem: Runaway uses of site columns with incorrect property settings and unintended results. Imagine a situation where a SharePoint site column is being used by a number of lists but, unintentionally, for two different purposes. An example of this could be the Address site column, a multi-line field with the NumberOfLines property set to 2 by default. This setting seems to be intended for US street addresses where City, State and Zip would be stored in separate fields. But what if this same site column was unintentionally being used for non-US addresses as well; it may be difficult to cram such an address into only 2 lines. Let’s say you had such a site where the Address site column was being used in a number of invoice lists storing invoices according to geographical area. Some of these areas use US addresses while some do not. To solve this problem you want to change the NumberOfLines property on each non-US invoice list from 2 to 5. But what you don’t want to do is to go through each list individually on each site collection where it occurs.
Our Approach: Using the new site column and field refactoring tool in Mossquito 2009 you simply import the site, highlight the site column in question and, as you can see, you have an editable view into all the usages of this site column in all of the site’s lists. It is then a simple matter to change the NumberOfLines property for international invoice lists from 2 to 5 and deploy the updated site as needed directly from Mossquito. Problem solved!
