Till SharePoint 2007
there’s no way to manage Content type centrally. To share Content Type across
site collection level or web application level in SharePoint 2007, you need to
copy the same content type in different site collections or web applications. Another
way could be to use web feature to enable content type across site collections
or web applications.But the good news is that SharePoint 2010 has provided out
of the box support for sharing Content types across farm level.
Publish
Content Type
The Enterprise Metadata
Management Service or Metadata Service (in short), allows to share Metadata and
Content Type across the farm. To share Content types you need to define the
content type(s) in a site collection (say CTSiteCollection). You can consider
the site collection (CTSiteCollection) as the place where you’ll put all your
related content types to share across farm. This site collection,which is used
to host content types or sharing,is called Content Type Hub.
1. Create a new content
type in a site collection that you want to share
First select a site
collection as a place to host your content types. You will define your content
types to share across, in this site collection. You can create a new site
collection or use an existing one. Once you have an site collection in your
hand, create a content type and for this discussion let’s name it
MyContentType.
2. Activate feature to
enable content publishing in site collection:
The site collection, which
will host content types for sharing, is known as content type hub. To enable
your site collection to be a content type hub you need to activate a
feature known as “Content Type Syndication Hub”. Once you have activated this
feature, you will find an option “Manage Publishing for this content type” in
your content type setting page as shown below:
3. Bind content type hub with
a metadata service.
Go to the central
administration => Application Management. Then select your metadata service
or create a new one. You will find there are two entries for each metadata
service. One is service and another is connection as shown below.
Figure 2: Metadata service
and connection
Configure Metadata Service: Now
click on the metadata service (but not on the name as this will bring you to
‘Term Store Management Tool’) and then click Properties button from the ribbon
on the top of the page. On the properties window there’s an option for Content
Type Hub and here put the url of your site collection you have selected/created
(for example, http://server:port/ or http://server:port/sites/mysite).
Now your metadata service is ready to be used by metadata service
Configure Metadata
Connection: To configure metadata connection, go to metadata service
connection properties and ensure that the connection consumes the content type
hub as shown below:
Figure 3: Metadata
connection settings for consuming content type hub.
4. Publish the content type
Now you go back to the site
collection (which is used as content type hub) and go to content type settings
page. Here in this page you will get the option “Manage publishing for this
content type” option. If you don’t get the option activate feature “Content
Type Syndication Hub” as described in step 2. Now click on the link “Manage
Publishing for this content type” and ensure the ‘publish’ option is selected
and then click OK as shown below.
Figure 4: Content type
publishing page
Now you are done but you
may not find the content type available immediately as the publishing is
managed by a timer job which usually run in every 15 minutes. To run the job
immediately you can navigate to Central Admin site => Monitoring =>
Review Job definitions. Then you can run the ‘Content Type Hub’ immediately.
Use
Published Content Type
1. Associate Metadata
connection to your web application:
To use published content
type from a different web application or site collection, you need to associate
the metadata connection with the web application. To do so navigate to the
Central Administration => Application Management => Configure service
application associations. Then click on the site link and you’ll be provided an
“Configure Service Application Associations” window. From there ensure you have
selected the metadata service which you configured for content type.
After associating the
metadata service with web application, you may not get the content type
immediately as a timer job will sync the content type between content type hubs
and consumers. To run the job immediately navigate to Central Admin site =>
Monitoring => Review Job definitions. Then find the job “Content Type
Subscriber”. There are one job for each subscriber. Find the job for your site
and run immediately.
2. Use Content Type
To use content type go to
the site where you want to use the content type. But before that make sure you
have associated the metadata connection for this web application as described
in step 1. Now create a new list in the consumed web site and go to list
settings. Then click ‘Advanced settings’ and select yes for ‘Allow Management
of Content Types’. Now click ok and move back to settings page and you should
get the ‘Content Types’ option as shown below:
Figure 5: Content Type
settings for list/library
Now you can click on ‘Add
from existing site Content Types’ and you should get the consumed content type
‘MyContentType’ as we created at step 1 under section ‘Publish Content Type’.
If you don’t find the content type defined in content type hub site, there’s
something wrong. To troubleshoot the problem move to the next section.
Troubleshoot,
if Content type is not available in the consumed web site
To find if there’s any
problem in publishing content type, go to site where you have defined the
content type. Then go to site settings => “Content type Publishing“. Here
you will find options for viewing error log. Though the error log is not so
much user friendly but you may get the gist of problem.
If there’s nothing in the
error log then make sure the timer job (which actually causes the content types
to publish/consume) is run. Timer jobs run periodically, may be after 15
minutes. To run the job immediately, go to Central Administration =>
Monitoring => Review Job Definitions. Find all jobs related to Content
types. After running all jobs check if content type is available. If not
available then search for error in the error log as described in previous
paragraph.
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