Content type replication not working on imported or migrated site collections

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Monday, April 4, 2011

A while ago I posted about a hidden feature that was needed if you want to use Managed Metadata columns in your SharePoint 2010 sites. We were doing some 2007-2010 migration work for a client recently that also involved exporting and importing sites and site collections to rework the content structure. Once we’d got the new structure sorted we discovered that content type replication was not occurring on the site collections we had imported. Some comparison of working and non-working SPSite properties with PowerShell later, we discovered that the culprit was the same hidden TaxonomyFieldAdded (ID 73ef14b1-13a9-416b-a9b5-ececa2b0604c) feature as I noted earlier. See my earlier post for instructions on enabling the feature.

As an addendum to my earlier post, which has code to enable the feature on a single site, Andy gave me the following snippet that will do it on all sites:

Get-SPSite -limit ALL |foreach{ Enable-SPFeature "73ef14b1-13a9-416b-a9b5-ececa2b0604c" -url $_.URL }

I don’t mind hidden features, per se, but when they’re not even logically named so I can associate them with their purpose, it’s annoying and time wasting. Why can’t we simply have a Content Type Subscriber feature that’s not hidden?