Beginning SharePoint® 2007: Building Team Solutions with MOSS 2007

6.1. Content Types Overview

A content type represents a group of informational items in your organization that share common properties. You can define these properties, which include name, description, a grouping category, to meet your business needs. In addition, you can adjust the properties associated with templates, workflow, site columns, and policy management as well as the settings for the document information panel. You can change these properties at any time and optionally apply those changes to your entire environment.

For more on the various content properties and what they do, see the section "The Anatomy of a Content Type."

SharePoint offers several content types that provide solid foundations for all future content types. You can select one of these content types and use it to create your content type in the central gallery, where you can then apply it to multiple lists and libraries throughout a site collection. By creating new content types, you can apply rules and properties to customize information and tie it to your business activities. Once you define your content type, you can create a new item by selecting the appropriate template from a drop-down menu presented by the New command on your library toolbar (see Figure 6-1). This chapter discusses the various elements of a content type as well as some of the configuration and customization alternatives of the most common content types.

Figure 6-1. Figure 6-1

Storing Custom Content Type It's important where ...