How to Move Site Columns Between Sites

Question

We have our SharePoint sites in the following tree structure:

Corporate
    +--- Division A
         +--- Department 1
         +--- Department 2
         +--- Department 3
    +--- Division B
         +--- Department 1 
         +--- Department 2 
         +--- Department 3

I have a number of metadata columns that are defined at the Division A level because they're used across all three department sites. Our Corporate Governance team recently chose to prohibit custom columns at the Division level, limiting that customization to the Department level. So I need to move some columns.

Let's say I've got a "NumberOfEmployees" column at the Division A level. Right now, I'm thinking that I'll need to do the following:

1. Create three NumberOfEmployees-Temp columns; one at each of the Department levels.

2. Copy & paste the metadata from NumberOfEmployees to NumberOfEmployees-Temp in each Department's data.

3. Delete NumberOfEmployees from the Divison A level.

4. Rename NumberOfEmployees-Temp to NumberOfEmployees in each of the three Departments.

Is there a less painful way to do this?

Answer 1

I'd be asking WHY the governance team is restricting custom columns at a given level.

A good process should allow for exceptions when justified.

Otherwise I'd be looking towards a Powershell script to migrate the data to save that manual step at the least.