Managing Content Centrally with Content Type Hubs

SharePoint 2010 introduces a new concept called Content Type Hubs -- simply put, it's a way to make content types available centrally and be reusable in the Farm. This is a huge improvement from SharePoint 2007 both in terms of management of content types and overall flexibility that comes with it.

Content Type Hubs enables you to create new content types and then make them available to other SharePoint site collections in the same or different web applications. Consider creating a content type called Employee and then let other site collections utilize it throughout the organization. Also in case you want to make changes to Employee content type, you can do it centrally.

In a nutshell, it's essentially a publisher-subscriber model, where content types are published by the Content Type Hubs using Metadata service and subscribers are the web applications in the SharePoint Farm. Finally, all the site collections in the web application which subscribe to this Metadata service will get this content type. In this tip you will learn how to create a new content type in a Content Type Hubs and then publish and use it elsewhere in the Farm.

1. Browse to SharePoint 2010 Central Admin web site, Create Site Collections ' Create Site Collections.

2. On the Create Site Collection page, fill the values as shown in figure below. I let SharePoint create the new Site Collection on the default Web Application, you may want to change this, to change Web Application click on the Web Application drop down, and this will open a dialog for you to select different Web Application.

Change the User name in the Primary Site Collection Administrator according to your environment. Click OK.

3. On the SharePoint 2010 Central Admin web site, select Application Management' Manage service applications.

4. Select Manage Metadata Service and click Properties located inside the Operations group of the Service Applications Tab.

5. Scroll to the bottom of the dialog and enter the URL of the site collection created in Step 2. Also select the check box as shown in figure below. Finally click OK.

6. Select Managed Metadata Service with type Managed Metadata Service Connection, and click Properties under the Operations group inside Service Applications Tab as shown in figure below.

7. On Edit Managed Metadata Service Connection dialog, select the check box stating Consume content types from the Content Type Gallery at http://[Your Site Collection Url]. Offcourse Your site collection URL will be according to the settings performed earlier. This is shown in figure below. Finally click OK.

8. Browse to site collection CTHub created in step 2, this site collection acts as a Content Type Hub/ Gallery, lets create a custom content type and later use it on different site.

9. Click on Site Actions' Site Settings. Click Site Content Types located under Galleries section.

10. On the Site Content Type Page, click Create as shown in figure below.

11. On New Site Content Type enter the information as shown in figure below. Click OK.

12. On the CentralizedCT Site Content Type Information page, click Add from new site column link located under Columns section, this is shown in figure below.