Chapter 13

Publishing Content Types to Use Across Site Collections

In the previous lesson, we looked at creating content types and reusing them across sites in a site collection. One of the complaints from previous versions of SharePoint is how content types could not be used across site collections. A lot of the advantages of content reuse would not apply from one site collection to the next. In this lesson you are going to see how SharePoint 2010 uses content type publishing hubs to allow the reuse of content. Now it is possible to define a central location from which content types can be shared across the entire farm.

Creating a Content Type Publishing Hub

To allow content types to be used across site collections you must first create a content type publishing hub. The requirements for doing so are as follows:

  • You must have a SharePoint Standard or Enterprise license. Content type publishing requires the Managed Metadata Service, which is not available in SharePoint Foundation 2010.
  • If you are not the farm administrator of your SharePoint installation you will have to enlist the administrator's help to set up the Managed Metadata Service application and perform some basic configuration.

Once the Managed Metadata Service is running, you will be able to designate a site collection as a publishing hub for content types. Content types created in a site collection designated for publishing can be accessed from any other site collection in the farm. The Try It section contains a ...

Get SharePoint Server 2010 Administration 24 Hour Trainer now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.