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 marc.anderson@sympraxisconsulting.com

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