Moving site columns from one site collection to another?

Question

Is there an easy way to move all the site columns in a particular group (e.g. "PepsiSiteColumns") to another site collection?

Answer 1

Out of the box, there is no easy solution. I recently had to move some site columns from development to production and had to resort to some custom PowerShell script. There's also no easy way to copy content types to another environment and/or collection.

In short, it can be done but you'd need to write some custom PowerShell to do it.

Answer 2

If you have a requirement to use site columns across site collections, you probably should consider creating a content type hub in order to centrally manage your content types. Even if you do not have the same content types in each site collection, you will probably be able to find a common base content type from which these would derive. This base content type would include the columns that you want to use across the different site collections.