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Content Types:Love Them or Lose ItMarc D Anderson
• Co-Founder and President of Sympraxis Consulting LLC, located in the Boston suburb of Newton, MA, USA. Sympraxis focuses on enabling collaboration throughout the enterprise using the SharePoint application platform.• Over 30 years of experience in technology professional services and software development. Over a wide-ranging career in consulting as well as line manager positions, Marc has proven himself as a problem solver and leader who can solve difficult technology problems for organizations across a wide variety of industries and organization sizes.• Author of SPServices• Awarded Microsoft MVP for SharePoint Server 2011-2016
Who Is Marc?
Session Overview For years, one of the most fundamentally powerful capabilities
in SharePoint has been Content Types. Content Types should underlie all good information architectures, along with customized metadata (Site Columns) and managed metadata which embodies the taxonomy for *your* organization. Yet far too often SharePoint users simply upload Documents into Document Libraries and wonder why no magic happens.
In this class, we’ll demystify some of these basic SharePoint capabilities to show you how you can really make your Intranet, Team Site, or Publishing Sites sing. It doesn’t matter if you’re on SharePoint 2007, 2010, or 2013, or on SharePoint Online in Office365. With search underlying so much of the value that SharePoint offers these days, a good understanding of these concepts is imperative to ensure your success.
What Is a Content Type?A collection of structured and unstructured data that taken together represents a business object
Inherits from an existing Content Type and is built up by adding additional Site Columns
Vacation Request
Product Overview
Invoice Contract Status Report
OrderProject Description
Facility Capabilities
What Is a Content Type NOT?It’s not a file type, e.g., DOCX or XLSX
It’s not [usually] just a media type, e.g., movie, document, etc.Training VideoCEO Podcast
You See Content Types Every Time You Use SharePoint
The out of the box Content Types are generic and don’t represent your business objects
Item Document
Event AnnouncementTask
When in Doubt, Use a Content Type Benefits
Consistent structure Easier management Improved search Move content through a process with workflow
Downside Up front planning and implementation work
It’s MUCH harder to roll out Content Types after the fact. Make the investment up front.
Content Types are Collections of Site Columns…
Inherited columns
Content Type
specific columns
System-managed
Name
CreatedCreated By
ModifiedModified By
Item
Title
…Plus Some Other SharePoint Goodness• Workflows• Document Information
Panel (DIP) settings• Retention policies• Templates• Site Columns become
managed properties for search
New Content Types Inherit from Existing Content Types: Client Example
Inherited columns
Content Type
specific columns
System-managed
Name
CreatedCreated By
ModifiedModified By
Item
Title
CreatedCreated By
ModifiedModified By
Client
AddressCity
StatePostal Code
Title
New Content Types Inherit from Existing Content Types: Announcement Example
Inherited columns
Content Type
specific columns
System-managed
Name
Title
CreatedCreated By
ModifiedModified By
Announcement
TitleBody
Expires
CreatedCreated By
ModifiedModified By
Department Announcement
Department
Home Page?
Body
Expires
Content Types Enable You to… Show me all of the Proposals we lost in the last month
How many Status Updates has Ralph authored?
Let’s show Announcements from across the departments on the home page
We should start tracking revenue for each type of Contract
Be a Little Pedantic Content Types are singular, e.g., Item, Document, Event
List and Libraries are plural: e.g., Shared Documents, Announcements
Contrary to common belief, words matter
Content Type Hub The Content Type Hub lets you shared information architecture across Site Collections
Hidden Site Collection on Office365 at https://[tenant].sharepoint.com/sites/contentTypeHub/
Hidden Content Type Hub on Office365 Tenants http://sympmarc.com/2014/11/25/hidden-content-type-hub-on-office365-tenants
Recognizing the Content Type Hub
Publishing a Content Type
• Create groups for Site Columns and Content Types with leading underscores _
Tips and Tricks: Management
Tips and Tricks: Maintenance
Document
Org Base Document
Contract
SharePoint Content Type
Interstitial Content Type
Useful Content Types Real Estate Contract Employment Contract
Parent Content Type
• Use Site Columns in the root of the Site Collection for lookups• Centralizes reference data for management• Can’t be in the Content Type Hub, sadly
• Managed metadata vs. List-based lookups
Tips and Tricks: Reference Data
Demo
Contact InformationEmail [email protected]
Twitter @sympmarcBlog http://sympmarc.com
SPServices http://spservices.codeplex.comSPXSLT http://spxslt.codeplex.comBooks http://sympmarc.com/books
The Middle Tier Manifesto http://bit.ly/middletier
