by Sandra Tersteeg, Senior Project Manager/Business Analyst

Allyis | www.allyis.com

Introduction

The planning of content types begins with your requirements and is integrated into the design and specifications for your SharePoint content management system through your information architecture. However, before we dive into these areas, let’s begin by defining content types.

What is a Content Type?

Content types in SharePoint allow you to associate metadata, templates and workflow processes to assets found within your content management environment. Assets can include a body of text about a particular subject, an image, document, spreadsheet, video, presentation, form, web page or a page layout. An asset can be thought of as any resource that contributes to the successful rendering of useful information to the person viewing your content.

Turning Requirements into Content Types

During the gathering of the business requirements, several scenarios are good indications of where content types would be used. Such scenarios could be:

• Associate similar metadata to multiple areas such as department, functional groups or subject area
• Provide consistent processes across multiple areas or sites
• Ability to find assets quickly
• Implement and maintain consistency across multiple areas
• A single template for multiple areas is used such as an absence request, presentation or a whitepaper
• Approvals are required from a central area across all other areas such as an expense report that is to be approved by the manager, and then passed to an accounting department for final approval and reimbursement

Designing Content Types

Now that you have established what content types are required, you can then begin to see the need for specific properties about content types to be shared among other content types such as Department Name, Type of Document or a template shared among several content types. To accommodate this scenario, you would first create your most basic high-level content type, and then create the others by inheriting the first. This allows you to manage a template, process or site column (metadata) at a core level and have it automatically populate to all other content types inheriting it. For example, when a new expense report comes out for the upcoming fiscal year, a simple update to the core expense report populates to all other content types inheriting it from other departments. This allows a corporation to define specific metadata while allowing individual areas to further define additional metadata based on their group needs.

After you have determined your content types and their properties, you will need to capture this within your design and specification documentation for whoever will be actually building and configuring your SharePoint sites. For an example of how that might be done, click here to view a sample Content Type Design & Specification document.