Professional SharePoint® 2007 Development

3.6. Understanding Content Types

SharePoint gives you the ability to organize and store data through the use of content types. Content types are what make it possible to store different types of content in the same list or document library. Basically, content types are a collection of settings that you can define and apply to your data. In SharePoint 2.0, when a list was created, you would define a set of columns that defined all data contained in that list. Every column was set up to track data for all items on that list, and all of the items had to fit into the schema defined by that list, and were ultimately contained by that location.

In SharePoint 3.0, the items in a list do not have to have metadata that fits into every column defined in the list. Metadata is the columns that have information that describe the information you are storing. For instance, you might store a document in a library, and the metadata would be items such as title, modified, and modified by. You can now take two different items that have different categories of information, and put them in the same list or document library. For example, if you needed to store information about houses that you are selling as a real estate agent, you might store the listing contract and offers. Each set of documents might have a different set of metadata, but they need to be stored together in the same list. This allows you to store data in a more centralized, organized manner. The different content types would each ...