Feature
One of the biggest challenges with SharePoint 2007 was working with enterprise wide content types. Fortunately, Microsoft heard the screaming and made a major change to SharePoint 2010 that supports an enterprise approach.
Working through the process of developing an enterprise information management strategy uncovers elements common across the organization. These commonalities should result in the establishment of a set of core content types, each with a standard set of metadata attributes.
The Trouble With SharePoint Pre 2010
A fundamental challenge faced by organizations with respect to specifying content types and metadata in earlier versions of SharePoint has been the inability to easily repurpose or reuse them across site collections.
Because site collections have represented fairly strict boundaries, most organizations have been forced to design and build custom solutions to get around this problem. Synchronization of content types and metadata across site collections required them to be copied or updated to each site collection, either manually by an administrator or programmatically through workarounds to the system itself.
Enter the Content Type Hub
Fortunately, SharePoint 2010 has addressed this issue through the implementation of Content Type Hubs. With the Content Type Hub, a specific site collection is selected to act as the central repository for content types intended for use enterprise-wide. Content types that are made part of the hub can then be syndicated, or published out, for consumption across other site collections.
Taxonomy and Metadata in SharePoint 2010
This was part five of a series on Taxonomy and Metadata in SharePoint 2010. The first four posts in the series — if you haven't read them — are:
- SharePoint 2010: Using Taxonomy & Controlled Vocabulary for Content Enrichment
- SharePoint 2010: Using Social Features for Personal Classification & Improved Findability
- SharePoint 2010: Using Taxonomy & Metadata to Improve Navigation & Browsing
- SharePoint 2010: Using Taxonomy & Metadata to Improve Search & Discovery
Next up we take a look at information lifecycle management through the application of retention stages.
