Power of the content type

In general most of us working with SharePoint know what the content type is. A SharePoint content merge together an item and information about the item.We can use different kinds of items: a document, an excel workbook, a KPI's, etc. With this approach we get metadata which can be used in many ways. All those information are obvious for most of us and it's basic knowledge for all SharePoint people. So why I am writing about it again? Because again I get the project which was previously developed by some super SharePoint heroes. And there are many libraries, lists without any single site collection column or content type! Isn't it amazing??? And now If I want to make any modification I have go through all libraries/ lists and check one by one. Just wonderful! So I would like to remind to everyone who are new to SharePoint or maybe they forgot what does it mean power of the content type.

1. How to add column in lists/ libraries. It's really simple. We just press the button "Create column", enter column name and that's it. Here is the column.

New Column

This approach is very simple and it not require any magic knowledge, any user with proper permission can do this. Well and that's all good news. What about case when we have more libraries or list where we want to store the same kind of information and then we want to change something? In such case we have go through them, one by one... It's the best way to create a chaos across the farm.

2. Much better solution is to use site column. It's very simple. You just need to enter "Site settings" and create column at this level. It looks like very small difference, in both cases we just created column, but the this small difference make a huge impact. First of all this columns flows down. I mean that it's available in all subsites. And in this case if we make modification it will be visible in lists/ libraries across the site collection! Also if we set our column as "Lookup Site Column" our "lookup" also works in other sites! It could be very useful if we run free sharepoint version and we can't user Content Query Web Part...

 

Site Column

 

3. Now it's time to add knowledge from previous point add create our own content type. It's not a rocket science. We just have to go to site settings, then we go to site content types, and then we just create our own content type. Please remember that we should rather put it into our own group. It will make easier administration. Also we should highlight that it's also is available across the site collection, which means that our changes are made in single place and then SharePoint will replicate it.

Content Type

New Content Type

 

As you can see it's not a big deal, but this approach allow us to use useful futures of SharePoint - Power of the content type. This power is related to centralized management. When we use columns and content types at site collection level we can keep our farm clean, without a mess. And sometime when we someone has to make our work it will be much faster and easier to find out how everything works.

This post was originally posted on my blog

by Tomasz Szulczewski via Everyone's Blog Posts - SharePoint Community