Chapter 12
Setting Up Content Types
In this lesson we discuss the concept of the content type. Information about how to set up content types is widely available in books, on blogs, and in many other sources of information on SharePoint. Yet despite the wealth of information available on this topic, it seems that content types are rarely used. As a SharePoint administrator of a site or site collection, you should know not only how to use content types, but also why using your own content types is a better means of organizing your information than relying on the default SharePoint settings.
This lesson and the accompanying video will attempt to accomplish two objectives. They demonstrate through practical examples why content types are useful and should be used as often as possible for organizing content. Second, in the walkthrough and video example, you walk through the creation of a sophisticated example to show you the power of the content type in SharePoint.
Using Content Types to Manage Content
Every organization manages a variety of content. Some obvious examples include:
- Documents
- Information kept in lists, such as employee rosters
- Web pages
- Images and multimedia
Many companies, before they consider a content management solution, attempt to organize their content by setting up a series of folders on a shared network location that everyone can access. Unfortunately people often simply duplicate the nested-folder method of data management even after installing SharePoint ...
