SharePoint 2007: The Definitive Guide

Content Types and Document Libraries

One of the benefits of managing documents in SharePoint is that you can organize them by content type. You may be used to thinking of documents in terms of their formatting, such as a Word document versus an Excel document and so on. Based on this perception, you would consider all Word documents to be the same. That's fine if you want to put all of your Word documents in one single repository and all Excel documents in a separate one, but what if the content in those differently formatted documents are related?

For example, let's say you are working on a proposal for a new software application. This proposal might include reports written in Word, spreadsheet information in Excel, and PowerPoint presentations. All these documents have different formats, but they contain content related to the same project. You might want to group all project-related documents under a content type of "Project Plans."

Conversely, a single document format, such as Word, may contain many different content types. You can create proposals, legal documents, organizational tables, hardware requirement lists, and newsletters. Each document serves a different purpose and may start from a different template, or require a different review process.

SharePoint lets you classify documents in terms of the following properties:

• Columns or metadata that you want to assign to a content type

• Document templates you create for this content type

• Customized forms you use with this content ...