I recently heard from a colleague who was frustrated that his users and site collection owners didn’t want to use content types. As such, I decided to write an article that he could reference when he wanted to give his users the main reasons, using non-technical language, why content types make sense.

You are likely reading this for one of two reasons. One is that you know why SharePoint content types are the coolest things since, well, temperature, and you need to convince someone that you are not completely bonkers.

Another reason may be that you’re not really sure why you should care about content types at all, and you’ve come here to understand these little miracles better.

In either case, welcome! It is a great day for us both. I get to explain to you why you should embrace content types like your first-born child, and you get to learn something incredibly useful.

What Are Content Types?

This may seem very obvious, but content types are types of content. I know, it doesn’t seem like it really tells you much, but it is much closer to the all-encompassing truth than you may realize.

Let me illustrate what I mean. How many papers do you have at home or in your office? I bet you can’t really tell, and even if you did, it wouldn’t tell you anything about what you had in your office.

If, instead, I ask you how many bills you have or how many Christmas cards or recipes you have, then suddenly you can understand what you have, rather than just paper.

The same thing applies for content types. You don’t care how many documents you have on your hard disk; you worry about how many invoices, proposals, contracts, letters, and so on.

But What Does It Look Like?

Great question, I’m glad you asked.

If you think about a Christmas card, I am fairly certain that I can guess what image pops into your mind. Perhaps a picture of Santa Claus or a pine tree, likely red or green, and probably snow. When you see a Christmas card, you know at once that it is indeed a Christmas card and not, say, a client proposal. A letter also has a certain look that makes it visually different from an invoice or a white paper.

In SharePoint, content types can also have distinct visual appearances. When you are filing your tax returns, the form can look different from the form you use when you request a new office chair or when you fill in an invoice. Thus, content types make your data easier to create by having customized forms that support the method of data entry.

Of course, how you fill in your Christmas card may be very different from how the card ends up for the recipient. SharePoint also supports different visual interfaces for when you enter data, modify it, or view it afterward.

Cool, but How Do I know What to Enter?

If you sit down with a paper, you need to know what that paper should be before you start writing on it. There is no structure by default; you need to know what your type of content should contain. Content type forms help you narrow down the choices and ensure you add the correct data every time.

For a Christmas card, there will be a To address written somewhere, perhaps a sender name, a greeting, and likely a stamp. However, you will not find a “Pay By” date on a Christmas card nor a list of reviewers, as you might find for an invoice or a proposal.

These properties or fields are called metadata in content types. A content type, like a Christmas card, has a set of these metadata properties.

If you know that you are going to write a Christmas card, you have a good idea about what types of metadata you need to input on the Christmas card. By knowing what type of content you are going to create, you make data entry much easier.

So, Types of Content, Now What?

What makes SharePoint content types especially powerful is the ability to attach behavior to your types of content. When you write a Christmas card, you have a certain process that the card goes through in order to perform its role. For example, you start by picking a nice card, then you enter data, then you affix stamps, and then you put in mailbox. From there, the card travels to the post office to be distributed according to the rules you set (the To address metadata property).

Of course, the post office has certain procedures as well for delivering that card to the recipient. When the recipient gets the card in their mailbox, even they have some form of process that usually entails reading, storing, and eventually recycling the card.

When you want to hire a new employee, however, you have a completely different process for the contract, as is the case for a proposal, which may go through a review process without ever being sent to anyone outside the office.

SharePoint allows you to attach behavior or processes to your types of content to ensure that the data performs its task as expected. This ensures that every time you send a Christmas card or submit a proposal for a new chair, you get the same result or at least the same process.

Even better, you don’t need to know all the details of the process; all you need to know is that you should submit a proposal, and the process itself, called a workflow in SharePoint, will know what to do. More predictability means less need to learn where to send which types of document and also reduces the chance of errors.

How Can I Find These Content Types?

Ah, well, here’s the trick. You already have content types. In fact, you have been using content types for as long as you have used SharePoint 2007 or newer.

You see, a paper, as indeterminate and flexible as it is, is a type of content. Granted, it is a very basic type of content, being blank with nothing to separate it from anything else. It is only when you start adding additional content that you further refine the definition of the type of content from “some paper” to “an invoice,” “a letter’, or ”a Christmas card.”

What if your archiving system was just filed by “paper.” Wouldn’t that be nice? You’d need just one archive and everything inside it would be “paper.” You could fire a whole generation of archivists and librarians and just chuck everything made from pulp into one huge filing cabinet.

I am guessing you see the irony here, because it would be impossible to find anything without looking through every single paper. You couldn’t say that “I want invoices sent to ACME Corp. in 2009″ because you’d have no way of knowing which of the papers were invoices compared to proposals or Christmas cards, much less have any metadata by which to search.

Traditionally, users have used filenames to store such metadata, so by naming a document or paper “Invoice to ACME Corp. 2009,” you could do a rudimentary search. Of course, that would work only until you needed every invoice that has a sum larger than $100,000, at which point your document names wouldn’t suffice.

SharePoint content types makes it easy to to identify the type of content but also isolate that content by the metadata you enter. And, because a Christmas card wouldn’t have a sum, you would have to search through the Christmas cards at all for that particular query.

Although you could get around this issue by storing different types of documents in different libraries, and probably even should, you still wouldn’t be able to narrow down the content by metadata. For example, rather than setting up a generic “presentation,” you could add metadata to state how long that presentation takes so that when you’re in need of a sales presentation for a 15-minute meeting, you have what you need easily available.

I’m Sold! Give Me Content Types Now!

Ah, I’m glad you agree with me that content types are cooler than ice. With these features in mind, I hope you’ve gained a better understanding of why SharePoint content types are powerful and why it is a much better classification system than just calling everything “document” and relying on titles to identify the right content.

Not only are content types a good idea, but they are really cool and will make your Christmas cards much more enjoyable because they won’t have any due dates or payments to be made.

If you’re interested in learning more, you should check out the USP Journal issue “SharePoint Content Types for Business Users” which details far more than I can cover here and teaches you best practices and step-by-step exercises for learning how to build complete solutions using content types.

If you enjoyed this article, let me know by posting a comment.

.b