Content Types: Love Them or Lose It

Marc D. Anderson
Sympraxis Consulting
8:15
- Least utilized most important
- People cannot find things because lack of content types
- This isn’t new. since 2007
- IA is so important. If you are not representing your enterprise structures, get with it.
- The naming of content types is part of your structure and taxonomy.
- This takes work though.
What are content types?
- What are they replacing? File cabinets?
- A collection of structured and unstructured data that taken together represents a business object
- Invoice contract
- Status report
- Vacation request
- Product overview
- Order
- Project description
- Contract
- Facility Capability
- CEO/CIO Video
- Inherits from existing content type and is built up by adding additional site columns
What isn’t a content type?
- not a file type
- it’s not usually a media type..it’s a “CEO video”
Out of the box content types do not represent your business. This is not a bad thing, but you should enhance content types to fit your enterprise IA and taxonomy.
Examples of Out of the Box Content Types:
- Item
- Event
- Task
- Document
- Announcement
- Created By
- Modified By
- Title
Benefits:
- Consistent Structure
- Easier management
- Improves search
- Move content through a process with workflow
Talk to the business and identify their business content types *
Enterprise level content types should be developed at the root level *
Downside
- You have to do some work
- You won’t get it right the first time
- This is a role actually, as a SharePoint advocate
- Folders may be ok for a person, as more people use it the more the folder concept is problematic
- It’s harder to role this out after the fact, do it early*
Content types are collections of site columns
- Item
- Title
- Createdby / Modifiedby
Good things:
- Workflows
- Document Information Panel (DIP) settings
- Retention policies
- Templates
- Site columns become managed properties for search
Use content: status report. learn the syntax. *
New content types inherit from existing content types
example: Announcement —> Department announcement
Be pedantic!
- Content types are singular, not plural
- List and libraries are plural
- Words matter, seriously.
Content type hub *
- Publishing content type (enterprise related)
- Bad idea to un-publish content type
- Centralizes content types
- Downsides..be aware
I like lookup columns over choice columns
- Risk level example
- Define risk level
- You can’t do this in the content type
- Lookup columns only work in collection, you can’t look in other sites or collections outside
“Find people in your enterprise with a librarian background…find them..use them..they are really freaky..but good at organizing information and metadata. * Staff dev / HR”
Tips and tricks
Create groups for site columns and content types with leading underscores
- Maintenance
- Take advantage of inheritance