​By Chris Bortlik, SharePoint Technology Specialist

At the SharePoint Conference 2012, Scott Jamison and I discussed approaches for managing SharePoint enterprise content types and columns at scale.

During our session we reviewed how to create SharePoint columns and content types programmatically, how to optimize usage of the content type hub, and strategies for effectively managing columns and content types at large scale. We presented real-world customer examples and lessons learned.

We also reviewed column usage and content type reporting utilities that were originally developed for SharePoint 2010 by Pete Gonzalez del Solar on the SharePoint team, which we enhanced to support SharePoint 2013. These reports can help with managing site columns and content types across your organization.

Many people asked if they could use these reports within their organization, so we are pleased to announce that all of the samples have been published on MSDN under an open source license.

Here are the links:

• SharePoint 2013: Column usage report
  Analyzes the field definitions from across multiple SharePoint lists and subsites, and then writes the results to a CSV report that can be viewed by using Excel.
• SharePoint 2013: Content type report Extends the column usage report to analyze the content type hierarchy and show which fields are referenced by which content types and whether the fields were customized.
• SharePoint 2013: XML object snapshot
  Generates a large XML report that represents the complete field schemas across all content types, lists, and subsites in a SharePoint site collection. These "snapshots" can be compared (for example, by using the WinDiff utility) as part of a diagnostic investigation to see what changed "before" and "after" an operation. At the conference, we talked about the content type push-down operation: What fields were impacted, and how did they change?

Conference attendees can download the slide deck and session video from here: SPC070: Deep dive on managing enterprise content types at scale.