What maps are associated with this shapefile/geodatabase?

[JeremySoules1]

My group has lots of data, and we are reluctant to delete anything for fear that that old shapefile might be attached to someone else's mxd.  Why not add a feature in ArcCatalog that would track what maps have been saved that are using a particular file? 

Right click>"Associated MXDs"

[DuncanHornby]

I agree, this would be extremely difficult to implement especially across multiple networks.  Whilst your idea is a good one I believe it is not viable.

I had to restructure a clients GIS system a year a go and I looked at the voyager software on this web site as a means of answering that very same question. I played around with the demo version, it appears to offer the solution you require if your are willing to spend the money.

But it was outside the budget of the project and now arcpy offers the ability to extract such information from MXD's and workspaces I wrote a script that trawled their GIS folder creating text files of whats in what and it was a matter of querying this files.

You also get into the nutty situations like users adding the same dataset to a MXD but with different featurelayer names or duplication of a dataset across multiple projects folders, exactly the sort of think you are trying to clean up.

[KariBuckvold]

While I can see the problems out lined below.  It would be really helpful if there was a tool where I could select a data file, a directory/folder and the output would be a lits of mxds where the data file was used.  I wouldn't expect the tool to search the whole server, my desktop and everyone else desktop, only the folders/subfolders I am interested in.