In my last post, we talked about the benefits of the Managed Metadata Service. We discussed the benefits of a centralized location for term sets, term groups, and terms. Since we have a centralized location for these items, wouldn’t it be great if we also had a centralized location for Site Columns and Content Types? And of course we do, it’s called the Content Type Hub.
The Content Type Hub is a feature of the Managed Metadata Service and when enabled allows you to create a new Site Collection to specify as the publishing hub. The rest of your enterprise application can then subscribe to the hub to consume Site Columns and Content Types. This is an extremely beneficial and time saving new feature in SharePoint 2010. Administrators can now manage Content Types from one location and all modifications to Content Types and Site Columns are pushed down to every subscriber Site Collection. It is a really easy feature to setup and configure and has no negative side effects or performance considerations.
At Perficient, our clients are finding extreme value with this new feature. We recently completed a new SharePoint 2010 implementation for a client that had 13 Site Collections and 8 custom Content Types. By implementing the Content Type Hub, our client will be able to manage and maintain those Content Types more efficiently. Can you imagine the time (not to mention the monotony) it would take to modify or add 2 columns to one of those Content Types in 13 different places?
While just a small new feature of SharePoint 2010, this is certainly an important one. Every organization should take advantage of this awesome new feature and the ability to reduce the time Administrators spend in SharePoint.
For more technical details, Plan for Content Type Hub
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