Hi we have been using sharepoint 2010 for the past couple of years. We have a number of site collections where we do the following:
we have a template site (team site) which we preconfigure
we save this site as a template
then during the course of the business process...
we create sub sites from this template/solution for each new project that we have
after we create a site from a template we set column default values on the library that is in this team site
this has been working fine in 2007 and in 2010 (well we never worried about metadata in 2007 but we are now in 2010)...
we have just found a big problem. Whenever we update the template site (by making some configuration changes to it, deactivating the existing solution/wsp and deleting it and saving our revised site as the same template), the column default values settings in all of the sites that were created from the original wsp/template site stop working with regards to column default values settings.
So If I go into and old site that was created before i replaced the site template/wsp/solution, and create a document, the default values do not flow through to the document even though you can see in column value default settings for this library are still set... I have started a support case for this and so far the support engineer has not been able to duplicate this behavious. So I thought I would throw it out to the forums to see if anyone else has had this problem. This problem has me seriously reconsidering our architecture and thining about using document sets instead, although that is a lot of work to switch over to a different architecture...
The support engineer has told me that this is not "best practice" delteing site templates/solutions while there are still child sites that have been created from this wsp in the site collection. We never considered this and it is bad for us as we have a lot of production sites like this... It would be nice if we never had to update our wsp/templates but unfortunately in the real word templates need updating... And there is no way to do this unless we deactivte, delete and re-save as template...
krd