Years ago I created a Content Type "Order Document" that I am publishing via the Content Type hub to thousands of SharePoint pages.
The content type is highly used by many users. Especially a site column called "DocumentKind" that is a managed metadata field (Term store).
So thousands of our documents have a "DocumentKind" attached and over the years we got more and more document kinds in the term store.
We now did a lot of cleaning and want to change the structure a little, to make life easier for our users.
My site column "DocumentKind" had this term selected:
You can see that users have a big hierarchy of "Terms" they could choose. This is not so easy and for this reason we simplified the whole concept for the future.
We moved the most important terms to a new Term called "DocumentType". The other terms should not be used anymore and also can get lost (we dont care)
But I am now afraid to change the site column like this:
In the moment I do this, users will only be able to select Document types from the term "DocumentTypes", but not terms of the rest of the hierarchy. This is wanted.
But what about the thousands of docs that have already terms attached?
- Will terms that we did not move to "DocumentTypes" stay in the site column? I dont care to much.
- But more important: Will terms that we moved to "DocumentTypes" still stay attached to all the documents, even though I am changing the hierarchy level of the site column?
I am afraid to publish this content type, because I am afraid to loose the metadata.
Can I safely do this?