Content Type Hub (CTH) SharePoint 2013

What is a Content Type?

According to Microsoft, A content type is a reusable collection of metadata (columns), workflow, behavior, and other settings for a category of items or documents in a Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010 list or document library. Content types enable you to manage the settings for a category of information in a centralized, reusable way.

Example:

* Imagine a business situation in which you have three different types of documents: expense reports, purchase orders, and invoices.
* All three types of documents have some characteristics in common; for one thing, they are all financial documents and contain data with values in currency. Yet each type of document has its own data requirements, its own document template, and its own workflow.
* One solution to this business problem is to create four content types.
* The first content type, Financial Document, could encapsulate data requirements that are common to all financial documents in the organization. The remaining three, Expense Report, Purchase Order, and Invoice, could inherit common elements from Financial Document. In addition, they could define characteristics that are unique to each type, such as a particular set of metadata, a document template to be used in creating a new item, and a specific workflow for processing an item.

What a content type includes in it?

Content Type in SharePoint includes following details with it:

* The metadata, or properties, you want to assign to this type. These are represented by site columns added to the list or document library when you add the content type. For more information, see Columns.

* Custom New, Edit, and Display forms to use with this content type. For more information, see Custom Information in Content Types.

* Workflows available for items of this content type. These can be defined to start automatically based on a selected event or condition, or through user selection. For more information, see the Workflow Associations property.

* For document content types, the document template on which to base documents of this type. For more information, see Document Template Element (Content Type).

* Any information necessary for custom solutions that are associated with this content type. You can store this information in the content type as one or more XML documents. For more information, see Custom Information in Content Types.

What is Content Type Syndication?

It is new feature that is part of the Managed Metadata service in SharePoint 2010. It solves a long-standing problem from SharePoint 2007, which is how do I create an enterprise library of content types and synchronize them amongst many different site collections. We often had to design and build solutions to work around this issue in SharePoint 2007, but now we have something that we can use out of the box.

In moss 2007, you have a Site Collection in Web Application1 and you have created a series of content types to use. Now, you create Web Application2 and find the necessity to reuse the content types created in Web Application 1. There is no way you could share or reference those content types created in Web Application1 in Web Application2. The only way possible is to create or write an application which would install those content types. This situation is pretty common in large organizations. This can be even considered for exposing base content types you use across multiple web applications in the farm.

What is Content Type Hub?

* SharePoint 2010 introduced a new feature called Content Type Hubs to solve it.
* Content Type Hub is a central location where you can manage and publish your content types – so now web applications can subscribe to this hub and pull down the published content types from the hub. Even receive updates on the published content types. Don’t you think it is of great value? Same feature continues to be in SharePoint 2013.