SharePoint: Everything You Need to Know About Content Types

hello everyone and welcome to Power Hour our topic today is content types in SharePoint in Microsoft 365 and how to use them how to use the content type Hub and different places content types can be created and of course why you would want to do that here's the Stinger [Music] all right so today's show you all voted last week for Content types we wanted to give it justice and do a whole hour based on content types and it's a it's an interesting topic in SharePoint because um it's like they sort of went away for a couple of years in my in Office 365 and then Microsoft's revamped them and kind of fix some things and created a modern interface to content type so we thought we would we we did a Content types Power Hour probably like eight years ago eight or nine years yeah I'm sure um but you know it's time to revisit it so um we actually have some slides and this is sort of a co-presentation Joelle did all the work well with all the slides and so we're both gonna kind of be talking through those and uh just you know demoing and doing various things so welcome everyone if this is your first time and Power Hour there is a form to fill out and there's a link under you know wherever you're watching this to click to fill out a form to request to join because we have our chat and teams so over in teams is where you can watch the video on YouTube while you're chatting with us and that's the fun thing that it's live and you don't know what's going to happen and we can just ask questions and have discussions about everything while we're uh while we're going so I'll go ahead and share my screen and now I still have you up at the top right like um I think I moved it [Music] I moved you last week because I think you were in the way of some um menu that I was using in the demo always I'm always on the way so uh let's see I'm gonna go let's see what is it pan no um yeah yeah why no X X okay let me do now do a little dance okay so Joelle take it away all right content types get hyped for content type um yeah so we're gonna talk through um oh crap I can hear an echo on my own voice that's what I want to try to do the best I can over it it's okay uh you know how when you're talking a lot you have an echo it's a little like so uh what is a content type um we're gonna start with that creating a Content types site columns and how they fit in and then how do you actually like apply them into listen libraries and then some of the advanced uh settings of content types um so we'll kind of jump right into just like what is a Content time so basically the official definition from Microsoft is that it is a um a thing an item that pulls together um information about um either a document or an item in a list typically there can be other types of content types but really it's mostly either going to be documents or items in a list um it is could be a specific like type of document or a specific um you know type of item in a list a content type really is going to associate those things with like key metadata um you know of things like a document template retention policy that type of thing so really the whole concept is I have a type of content that I want to have maybe in more than one place so typically when you have like a library or a list um you know if you just that's the only like place you're going to create that that library or that list thing you know it's just in that specific library then there really wouldn't be a need for a content type where a content type comes into play is if you need to have a type of content that is available in multiple locations whether it be multiple libraries multiple lists multiple sites um the really just the ideas that you would have this thing that has maybe the same template the same columns all of that stuff so same settings all of that stuff associated with it and you can use it in multiple different libraries multiple different sites that kind of thing so it's really at the high level that's what the idea of a content type is so we can go forward um and we'll talk about it I'll kind of wrap back around to that in a few minutes but just wanted to kind of show you that there are like existing even if you have never ever created a custom content type yourself like one that we're going to go through today um there are content types that you use every day though so in SharePoint so um a lot of them are just the default content types that um SharePoint kind of comes with if you ever go into a library um in this example it's just showing like the new drop down of a library everything you see there is technically a content type a folder is a content type all those different document types or our content types essentially uh the link is even technically a content type and then if you go into a list and you click the new drop down you're typically going to see like the item like it says item by default um that's the content type too so all of those are content types they have whatever columns you associate to those lists or libraries associated with them um but really you don't as like an end user power user you may not if you haven't used content types before you may not really pay attention um to those things in in any real detail but it's just kind of helpful to know that those are content types and they are default and they exist um out there so what we're going to talk about today though is really just if you need to have some kind of a custom uh content type in what you would do to create that and why so we can go forward so you know one of the first things you might want to think about is what are the different types of content that you have in your organization um so here's some just like examples of things I've seen that have become content types like things like policy proposal contracts project plans monthly budgets expense reports of course these things could also become like a power app or a form you know like there's just different scenarios for you know different types of content just so how whatever you want to do to get those into uh SharePoint and into Microsoft 365 like world but these can be good examples of content types and really one of the things like I mentioned before is you can kind of go to the next slide Laura because I'll talk about this um so one of the things I mentioned before is like why I use content types right so um the biggest kind of these are kind of the three things I thought of so we used to use content types A lot more frequently and for everything like we would build like pretty much like every like even if it was only going to be used in one Library we would still like create a content type for it so it had this metadata associated with it um just in case maybe it would be used elsewhere and so content types were a big big thing and we use them a lot too because the search features uh weren't great um you know the way we design intranets wasn't kind of as efficient as it is now a lot of those things just really didn't exist so content types were like a necessity to be able to find anything anywhere ever um whereas now a lot of the like things that we do in these sites and the way we build out these sites and the way we do navigation and search and things like that are so improved that that like high level of Need for Content types isn't really there um but there are certain situations where they make sense and these are the three things that like I kind of thought of um if like a customer asked me uh the first one would be you have a type of content that's used across multiple sites or even multiple libraries within a site uh and you want to have some centralized control over the metadata and maybe some of the other settings like the template that is available with that piece of content so in a little bit Laura is going to go through um a demo and really the whole idea is um like I think the first one we'll talk about is just at the site level so like if it was across multiple libraries so like the example would be you have a a project site that has a different library for every project and every project needs to have a project plan um and it should be this very specific project plan that gets uploaded with these very specific metadata columns that they have to fill out and it should be the same in every library and you want to be able to centrally control what those columns are that are available when they use that project plan um and that's really what the whole idea of a content type is is just to kind of give that centralized control um and so of course we're going to start off at just the site level just to show you like there is a difference between creating sorry there's a landscaper right outside you can probably hear that but there is a difference between creating a content type like directly on the site that you're on and a difference between creating it at a higher level so it can be used across multiple sites and we'll show both so that's kind of the main reason why you might want to consider a content type some other things oh sorry there's just two other things real quick there we go um so the other two reasons would be if you are going to extensively use PNP modern search if you want to use those web Parts you want to customize search you're going to you plan to use those then I would really think about using content types because content types are really easy to kind of use and search for filtering and querying and things like that um even in the modern stuff it's still they it's really really easy to just type in content type equals X and then be able to get results really quick so that is just one thing to kind of think about is if you plan to use that search stuff heavily you need search that's a little bit more intensive than like what's available out of the box then that would be another reason the third reason is just if there's any kind of custom development where you're rolling up content of a certain type that might be another reason where it would be helpful to have content types to kind of rely on for that because that can be a little bit tricky um for a developer you know if they don't have if content's just spread across multiple sites on possible libraries and there's not a great way to kind of roll things up content types can help with that so what really the main the first one is probably the main thing and then the other two are just some other reasons I could see where it would be helpful to use them okay now I'm done with that one all right I'll talk about this real quick and then I'll let Laura jump into um the demo stuff so creating content types um you create content types and you there's two locations uh you either create content types directly on the site that you're on and really the question would be for yourself would be is this content I only ever going to be needed on this site do I need it across multiple libraries or lists on this site then I probably this would be where I would want to go ahead and create that and you just create it directly in the site settings the classic site settings screen and then if you need which is kind of my default to be honest I tend to default to the content type Hub even if I'm not sure just because then it's always available in the future if any other sites want to use it but the content type Hub which is in the SharePoint admin Center you can get access to that and not have access to the whole SharePoint Center there is like a setting for that um but that is where you would want to use the content type across multiple sites um and that's again that's what I typically default to but will show you both just so that you're aware that you can do it in both locations and then I think the next slide Laura just goes through like The Inheritance stuff I don't know if you wanted to talk about that before you jump into just creating one because I know you remember this is all the old this is kind of like still the same as it used to be but I could talk about it if you want me to um yeah we can just go straight into the what it looks like and then maybe when they see what it looks like in SharePoint then some of those other slides that might make more sense can you hear me okay all right yeah okay all right I was messing with my mic settings okay so here is a SharePoint site if I go to just any Library on my site and I go to my library settings more Library settings you'll notice there's there's nothing here showing by default about content types but if you go into advanced settings you sort of turn it on and it will light up and it even mentions if you have content types you'd like to apply you can now enable yeah you don't just so you know they don't they don't have to do this anymore um this is just to show them but yeah I want to show what it looks like so you can see it so you know kind of understand like in a list and a library what the content type is because they kind of hide it in here but it's like if you want to be able to just view where it is so this that setting that I just changed just basically turns on this little section here in your list or Library settings and that way you can just see and Visually know that this library is using the content type called document and you can do the exact same thing in a list Microsoft list which is a SharePoint list and you can see if you did the exact same thing in the list settings you'd see that the default content type is called item in the old days with all those old classic templates that they had for lists that were like contact and tasks and all those different like old school classic list templates those actually had different content types for different list templates you would use now they're all just item I'm pretty sure yeah I'll just item they all just they don't have special content types so that's you don't have to do that but that's where you can be able to tell if you wanted to look at what the content type is called so I can just turn that off and I'm so I'm not really changing any settings I'm just basically just turning that on and off just shows me what the content type is so we'll go so what I'm going to do in this site is just I'll create a new library and um so this is a project site so I'm going to create a new document library and I'll just call it project a documents files or whatever and then um I'll create another one now some people when it comes to projects people manage projects a lot in SharePoint some people create an entire site for each project but in this example I'm just saying let's just say that you had one site where you had multiple libraries just for a few different projects and and just each Library had the files for that project so you're just keeping it in one site there's just one way that you could do it so then um if I want to have a template not a template but a content type that I use across all the project libraries then that would give me this sort of standardization that Joelle was talking about so then that's where I go here right and I go to no it's in site settings oh okay I have to create it first before I add it site content types and so the parent content type for all document libraries is just called document so whenever back to the slides we can talk about the inheritance part of it oh yeah there's like a slide okay well I'll just create it real quick and then show where you have to pick what the parent is so that it makes sense because you have to start with like this base sort of template of what it is what the content is like is it an item in a list is it a document in a library and that's like sort of your your basis that you have to start from when you create one so I'll just call it um project files and this category thing is just for you to be able to organize them so really technically it doesn't make a difference with the category thing and then the parent category is going to be document and then the content type is going to be document anytime you're doing something with a live with files in a library if you're dealing with pages in a Pages Library that's different you have a pages um you have a page content type but that's we're just doing files in a library right now all right so then you saw how I had to pick from it so I'll get Joe I'll let Joe I'll go back to the the part about and talk about the inheritance a little bit yeah just go back one slide oh yeah there we go yes just what Laura was mentioning basically every content type has to be based on another like existing default content type um and the children content types that you create they kind of extend the parents which means that they will inherit all of the features and the columns that exist for like like for example like what she did document so like document has like title um and name and things like that those are default things that are built into a document content type and so she created a new one from that that she can then add existing um like columns and settings too so you'll see the base content type is document and then you can even continue to go down like the road from there if you needed to but then like you had two parent documents one for sales one for project and then they're under sales you had another document that was a proposal and then each of those levels um would have like could have their own columns and things like that so you can go to the next slide and then basically if a change is made to the parent so Microsoft pushes a change out to the regular document content type the one that exists out there um then that gets automatically pushed down to any of the document content types anything that's like inheriting from that document content type but if you change something in the child like at the proposal level uh it does not get pushed back up obviously and changes made in the parent content types can override things that are in the child content type so that's something to keep in mind another big thing that we didn't mention but I will say it just because we've dealt with issues with this speaking of SharePoint horror stories is you don't ever want to change the default content type so like things like the document content type that's out there by default in the item content type that's out there by default like do not change those do not go in there and add columns to those or change their names or do anything like that it can cause like a lot of issues um but you can like Laura showed create a new content type that uses the document and then kind of has the same features of a document so all right I'm gonna go back to the demo well here's yeah I think that was the thing that I just did so we could go through you may as well talk us through this part this just says create content type at the top so you just saw me do this yeah so you're basically just deciding on your scope so whether you're creating it on the site or the content type Hub which will show um entering the name and description choosing the category like Laura showed and then again choosing that parent content type I would say the most common one there's so many out there it's so funny because there's so many like old things out there but the most common ones are really probably going to be like item for a list document for a library and then maybe page I've seen a few people create like page content types before um but really that's about it that's like the three that you'll probably end up using if if you use any so all right and then the next part which um you want me to talk through this and then you'll show it yeah yeah so the the next thing that you typically would do after you create it is you would add the columns which are called site columns uh because they exist at the site level or that at the content type Hub level um and you can either select from existing site columns like there's some defaults that columns that are out there that you can add to your content type or you can create your own like just like you could in a list or Library so like the same types that you're used to like choice and or um a single line of text and people like all of those types are available as site columns so you can just like you would directly in the library you can create them out there um any one site column that you create can be used in multiple content types so if you create a new site column in this content type that Laura is working on you can use that site column in a different one later and then each column actually has the ability to be like set as either being required which is pretty familiar optional or even hidden so like if you wanted a content type or a column to be on the content type that you're gonna like programmatically put information in say was like a workflow you could just set it to Hidden it's never going to show up for the user but behind the scenes you'll have it to be able to populate with like information if you needed to okay so um another well another thing that I noticed like with the site columns is sometimes you want to create columns just the columns so think about like this when I'm creating Business Solutions if I have um maybe I have several different lists and that I'm using like in a power app I'm doing something in a solution that I'm building that's like an automated business process I'll just maybe I want to have a column called status or something pretty generic that I want to use across multiple lists in my site and I want to just create a site column well now you can't you can't really create just the column right you have to create just a content type that you don't use and create the site column in it if you want to use it like in the maybe maybe we talk about that when we get to the hub part yeah it's that's for the that's for that Hub level yeah so here at this level you can still create a site column you know like you could still go around in like if you're only creating it on this site you could do that but if you want to create a site column that's like goes across multiple sites yeah and when there is we do have a slide on the end about that too so we can we can Circle back but you're right yeah you have to kind of finagle it weird okay so here I I click create new site column or you can add from existing if you have um I'll do a new one I'll show you what the existing ones are but um what am I going to create um so this is going to be projects so I'll just say project manager and um not single line of text I want it to be a person or group I only want it to just be one person I could say yeah I want the profile photo to show you'll notice all these settings looks the same as what you would see when you're in the library creating columns um do you want to be required or not Etc and when you're creating it do you want this creating this column do you want it to update everything like right now um anything that's if you're in a content type right now that's already being used and you already created it like a while back and it's already being used in multiple places and you're adding a column it's just asking you if it if you need it to immediately update everything um and then I'll go ahead and add so I added project manager I'll say add from existing site columns and then this is where you've got a bunch of psych columns that exist like most of these are from those old school um those old classic content types that we were talking about so like I can um let's see that's one that I've used before Oh priority is a good common one so prior maybe I want to have a priority column for my files I just pretend that I need to do that and so I can add existing site columns that maybe I created it already somewhere else in the site but I just want to reuse it and not have to go type the name of it again um and I can go great and see what else for a project um category or no like project status and I can make that custom columns and get a choice so like what Joelle was saying about update about making updates they trickle down and not up so if you go to like your parent content type and you start changing what the choices are in a site column all the choices you change there apply everywhere like that that content type trickles down so I'll just say new in progress I'm just making stuff up um waiting completed there and you change the colors here too that's fairly new um and then I don't need a default maybe maybe I want my default to be a new project so everything that's new new gets that status and then I can also decide if it's a drop down a radio all those same options that I'm used to having and so now I've got a content type project files and I've got three cat three uh columns that I added to it so then if I want to actually use that I could go to I'm going to go to back to my um site itself so right now I'm kind of like embedded inside of all these settings here all right so I've got project a files and this is where so after you've created it then this is how you go at it so you don't have to go at it in the list the library settings like you used to have to so this is the kind of new thing where you just scroll down here and you click add a content type what is the see all column types is that totally unrelated show you more imagine metadata and stuff okay so that's unrelated yeah add a content type click next and now it's going to that's the only one that I've created so that's the only one I can pick from then I apply it and then I want to go to it says it added it go to Project B files add a content type what happens if I add a content type after there are already files in here the files in here will already be the document content type right and then I can even see when I add a column it's going to have content type as a thing I can add here right yeah so if I want to be able to see what content type if I have various files in a library that may be of different content types um so now I have document is one that's still in this library and project files are both two different content types that I have in this library and maybe I want to see what content type things are just to be able to visually see it in that column so I'll do show or hide columns in this other one so I can see content type and then when I um in I'm in one of these libraries and I click the new drop down and I can choose project files now I didn't create attempt we haven't even done anything with an actual like document template yet we're just showing you the column concept now the tricky thing about this is it added the columns when I added that content type to this library but you can't see them because it doesn't automatically add them to The View so then in my view you'll notice that um well I'm just going to go like in the old school way I'm going to go straight to the library settings and just look at what all the columns are here and you can see now it's got priority project manager and project status so the columns exist you just that's a separate step you have to take to go add them to the view unfortunately so I could go the old school way and go add them to my view in here or I could just go I would have to go to both libraries click show or hide columns and go to um project manager priority project status and then just add them there and we're in my project so we're High columns here and should I go ahead and create a file let's see new project file it's just a blank one but you can create one yeah whatever I don't know why it said that that was odd test so it's just a new blank file I don't know if I don't know what I think about that default black um background there in Word um first file it shows me where it is and then okay so now here I am I'm in the document so I can just close my tab and go back and I can see that it created it so now it shows me that it is a project file content type and then I can go and I can go in here to the information panel and click on it and see the properties over here and I can see that that's where I can edit my columns well priority normal or whatever high low and Status I'll change it to in progress you notice that it put it as new because I set that as the default now if I went in here and created a new just a document and then I'll just say then you'll see I've got document in here but if I go over to the properties it's in the same library but this document doesn't have the same columns it doesn't have those that I can fill in so technically and it's just on the form though because technically I could go into grid View and I could put stuff in those columns they just wouldn't show in the form if um this was not that content type so you sometimes what you might want to do is actually go in remove and so I think the only way to remove a content type is to go into that old school way in the library settings right I think you can remove it from the menu oh you can just remove it from drop down yeah yeah so you just get rid of it here if you don't want create people creating folders you can get rid of that here too um so now all they pretty much as I left Link in there so they could create a project file or a link but when you actually want to delete the content type that's when you go in that first way that I showed but it's not going to let you delete it if you have files in there that are of that content type so um all right so any questions about that part um no all right um should go back to the slides okay um yeah and that required feel thing that is interesting What Jeffrey mentioned because you can actually have a field and make it required in one content type and not required in another so let me show you all um golly I wrote this blog post so long ago um content types of statuses 2009 I wrote this blog post but it's still kind of a fascinating like an interesting Theory or kind of a way that you could do things by simply using content types to hide and show and make different things required depending on what content type they are but a lot of that doesn't apply anymore because now you can actually go in and edit the form of a list and just uncheck boxes and stuff into term anyway so just a kind of another concept to read about to maybe get your head around this a little bit more all right I'll go back to the slides mm-hmm so we did that one so then now we're talking about the Hub yeah so we'll demo um The Next Step would be like so we kind of Laura kind of showed creating a content type at the site level um and then again that's just going to be applicable to that site so you're only gonna be able to use that content type within that site and like she was showing in multiple different document libraries within that site so now kind of moving up to the next level would be to actually create that content type if you wanted it to be used across multiple sites which is probably the thing that you should try to do most of the time I mean unless you just can't for some like permission reason but the content type of yeah like there is ways to give access to the content type Hub and not the entire admin Center there is like a setting for that a role for that if you will um but so you basically would create it at the content type Hub level and then there's a kind of a publishing aspect that we'll talk about with it um and then once you create it there then you would click the publish button on it and then it would you would go through the process that Laura went through to add it to whatever sites library or list and then it would become available um so basically the content type Hub um has very similar like like it's very similar to create a content type as you just saw in the site the only main difference is that there's a publish button there uh when you're actually in there creating you'll see a publish button and when you get done like kind of creating it adding The Columns and everything you have to hit that publish button you have to like confirm that you're publishing and then once you do that then you will be able to go over to your site and then add it to library and then whenever you go back into that content type you got to make a change to a column you gotta you know change a setting you have to go into publish and hit republish you can also unpublish if you want it to become like unavailable um and then create but just keep in mind that this is only for content type Hub stuff you don't have to worry about publishing with your site level stuff it's just in the content type Hub but yeah Laura if you want to go ahead and just show the proposal thing we were talking about um and then we'll come back after that and we'll talk about like templates and stuff so from the SharePoint admin Center I go to content Services right is that what you wanted me to do you have to type Gallery content yeah Gallery somebody asked that it's the same thing just wanted to point that out it's just another way where Microsoft is using two words it used to be a special SharePoint site that we called the content type Hub so that was like what you called the site so now they just kind of like named it okay so I'm going to call this company policies because maybe we want to have company policies in libraries just all over in different sites but they all need to use the same template in the same set of columns and maybe we want to be able to roll up content company policies and have be able to people be able to find them in Search and things like that but we want people to be able to have them in their own sites now an alternative to that specifically for Content company policies would be to just have one big site where you put all of the policies in one place but in this example it's policies that you're storing in just various libraries in various locations but you're just standardizing on the template and the columns policies that was also going to be a document content type policy owner the person in charge of the policy so that's going to be a person and policy date let's just be like the date that goes into effect um policy uh category yeah category would be good what our department Department maybe well that's tricky because is the is the department the site that you created in I don't know yeah but you might use Department in like search later yeah that's that's a good idea let's see department and then that can be um that kind of gets tricky because then do you have a lookup list of what all your departments are I'm just going to type some departments in here yeah HR yeah we're not getting into like the term store and stuff during this session but you would definitely you could utilize like a management metadata or a lookup or something like that to do that kind of thing blah blah blah so here just you know you list all your departments there I don't have a default and I'm just going to click save so now I've got just all I've done though is the columns do you want me to go ahead and do um do the actual template too are we do that there is a slide on it so we can talk about it and then come back and show how to do it and the template's something we can push this out publish it and then add the template later and then I'll go to some different so this is the other site was a project site I have a couple of different think about like all of your different departments at work and all these different sites for the different departments and each department may be having their own set of policies so I'll go ahead and just create um a library policies in my Northwest marketing site add a content type let's see if it lets me um if it's already out there yeah that was fast and so now I've added that one to that policies library and then I I can really call these whatever I want to I don't have to call them the same thing but I'm just creating another library and then I'm saying add a content type and policy so if you added several in your content type main Hub Gallery thing then they would all show there and you'll notice that as it adds the content type I'll go back to this other one and I go to the library settings then you'll see that now I've got two here and that's weird because this this I guess this automatically shows it automatically turns on that setting to allow management of content types if you add one in that new UI so here are the two content types that exist in here and then here are all those columns that I had created so then it's up to you you'll have those columns in the metadata but it's up to you if you want to add them as columns like to visually be able to see them here I just put a couple of them in the library all right you want to go back to the slides sure talk about the template concept okay let's see so that was publishing so then we kind of already talked about this part I'll let you go over it though yeah yeah this is what you were showing where you basically how you add it to the list or Library just what Laura's been showing so you select the add column like little um the tab at the top at the end of your your list of existing columns uh scroll until you see the add a content type click next select the content type from the drop down and then click apply so that's all really what that is which is what Laura was showing and then this is just showing I think you kind of showed this already Laura but this is just showing that if you had an existing document that you wanted to switch to your new content type um then you could do that in like in the properties pane so like you can you can like edit the properties of the document and do it that way or you can click the little I in the top right hand corner of the library and choose content type and like choose to switch it that way um so you have like two different ways of doing that but that but you don't like if you have documents already existing you can switch them over later um if you wanted to that's just kind of showing where you do that it's a piece of metadata just like anything else and then here so we have advanced settings um so in your content types this is this applies to the site content types like that you create directly on the site and those that are created in the content type Gallery sorry I ought to get used to saying their new word for it uh so that we have three different areas so that you'll see under advanced settings you have template which will demo which is where like in a doc this is for documents um it doesn't there's not a template I think anymore for items um so if you had a like like Laura is doing a policy right so if you have like a policy template that you wanted everybody to use like the actual document template you could upload that here and that way when they click to like in the new drop down when they click on policy it's going to load that template that they would then add their own information to and save uh you also can determine the permission so if you want like the users on their site to be able to like add columns to the content type and do things to to the content type like on their own site you can set that to be edit or if you don't want them to do that like if they just get what they get from what you create in the content type Pub sorry content tip Gallery um then you would set that to read so we'll show that and then update there's just a check mark That's automatically marked and it's all it says is like whenever you make a change to your content type or a site column um it's just basically saying that it's going to push that update to everywhere with that site column and that content type are used and if you uncheck it it wouldn't do that but by default it's checked so it just automatically like pushes that out to everything that that is using it so but yeah if you want to show that's in the if you go back to your content type gallery and go back to policy then we can see those settings so this yes what am I clicking on that one let's see I've got a whole bunch of demo content company policy template there we go and I will show you all what the company policy template looks like real quick it's just like this just it's got like a certain coloring format and things that you want people to create their content their company policies as so I just uploaded it here um this means this do you already go over the setting I don't think the read versus edit that's what I was talking about okay yeah I was just talking about that okay so now I pushed it out should we go look at the libraries and see that exists over there yet oh I need to publish it though republish republish so yeah after you make all your changes then be sure and click publish so that it will go out and then that seems like uh I mean we'll see how fast that went out so let me refresh that and then see if I create a new company plus somebody was adding me asking me about link how you get rid of it that is a great question I guess you can't get it I don't think you can yeah you can I don't think okay we'll address that in a minute we'll save that for last so I'll create a new company policy no it doesn't have it out there yet I just created it as like a blank document that that's that's kind of a more drastic change actually putting a file in there because in that file I guess just it has to push that file out to all these libraries that are using it um let me see yeah it was pretty quick for me yesterday just take a couple of minutes no it didn't work we'll just we'll come back to that we'll do like a cooking show you want to just add it to another Library I'll add it to another Library oh okay yeah that's a good idea um I'll go back to my um SharePoint admin Center and just go like find another site real quick this is one of those demo tenants that's got all the little like fake sites and stuff like that so I'll go to same access to global sales yeah so we'll go to Global sales and create a new library all these and then add my content type here and notice it's got a checkbox so you can add multiple ones at a time you don't have to do them just one at a time and let's see if I go now it says it's added it and copy policy come on company policy oh yeah there it is it's kind of ugly with this black background um why does it do that how do you isn't there like a quick way to make it so it's like a different I don't know not black I think there's a setting anyway all right oh dark mode there we go okay it was fine okay so it looks kind of weird in the webview but that is my company policy um what's the policy dress code now the font it looks like is white so it's not anyway but that's uh that's how you can create one and I didn't yeah so there's the name for it and now it's got all those columns and on our date Department whatever I want to add and then I have that metadata that I can go add in here and um tell it Joelle is the policy owner the policy date is um yesterday and the department and then like Joelle mentioned um if I go and edit my properties I can change the content type here watch this if I change it to document it makes it look like all that data disappears but it didn't it didn't actually delete the data it's still there so it's really just changing the content type pretty much just hides The Columns from the form but the data that I put in the columns is not gone anywhere so I did change the content type but I still I didn't lose the information that I put in there what am I doing next Joelle so oh I can go back to those other ones and see if it ever pushed out to them no not yet okay you might have to do so we can like show how they're if you go back to the slides we'll come back to that in a second there's a troubleshooting one we can come back and I'll show you how you could troubleshoot that yep so we talked about those are the advanced settings so really the template being the biggest one but there's also that permission and the update one that you saw when Laura was showing that and then the next one and then policy settings so policy settings was interesting I kind of took some time to look at it yesterday um this used to be a big deal uh back in the day when we would create these but I think really it seems like the only one that still might work is the retention one uh and the retention is something that you can add basically where you would say like after a certain amount like like five years after the created date or you know you can use whatever date to basically specify a certain amount of time that the file should do you know whatever the action is a lot of those are the most common ones would be like moving the file to another location maybe like an archive Library um or to just remove it like delete it after a certain amount of time like you have those retention options you can set um on a content type there is also like auditing barcodes and labels barcodes and labels are very rarely used if ever at all but auditing we used to use it's like an audit report but I don't believe that those audit reports are still available like all of that auditing stuff now happens in the like what do they call it now the compliance Center or whatever they change the name of that all the time but that happens at that level and I don't think these the audit reports that it's talking about here are related to that um so I wouldn't bother with the auditing barcodes and labels you guys in the you know you guys let me know if if I'm incorrect if you've seen that it does function still um but the retention one you can certainly do that um and that seems to still work okay um but if you want to show that Laura it's just in the if you go to your company policy um it's just in the second of the settings that was in that setting drop down and we can look at that and it just takes a second and then you click add retention stage and then this is where you could set like your retention stage and you have like your date so that you specify and then your um yeah is that showing like you were just I can't your screen's always blurry for me because the way we do this but it was it showing you like that metadata that you created that's one of the options in the date thing yeah and then you could do there from there you could do like move to a different library or delete or you know like the the workflow ones won't function because that's not flow so don't do that um but like the other like definitely moving to a different library or deleting our options that you could still use and then as I mentioned the audit reports like I I don't think that those still function because I don't I know that those Auto reports are not out there any longer um and I remember that those were the auto parts we have we'd have to go to to get those so um you know I wouldn't probably bother setting those up because I'm saying it'll be a waste of your time look it take me it took me back into this interface I found it oh yeah content type Hub I hacked into it that's funny I wonder if that's just because we've had our tenant so long no this is the demo one oh so yeah that's right this is apparently what it's calling it just behind the scenes you just I just found a hacky way to get to it apparently so it's just a blank SharePoint site where you just it's just deemed the content type of anyway um so am I going we're going to the troubleshooting slide we only have five minutes left yeah sure we can just talk about it yeah so these were um a couple things so I'll mentioned the the third thing too which was the I added a template and it's not showing up yet that Laura ran into so the first one uh what if you need a site column across multiple sites so like if you need a site column on your own site and that's the only site you need it on then you're good to go you can just go into your site settings go to site columns and just add a site column and then you can just go and add that directly to a Lister Library there's no content type needed you can do it as like kind of separately from content types but if you want a site column that's going to go across multiple sites it has to be from the content type Gallery you have to create a content type there is no place to do just the site column at that level so you have to create a content type so even if the content type is a throwaway you're never going to use it you would have to just create a content type it would have to be the a parent of the wherever you want to put that column so if it's a column for documents you would want to make sure that content type was a document content type and then you could go ahead and add your site column there then what would happen is you would have to add that content type this is where this is very annoying I'm going to be real clear with you guys you would have to add that content type to your site to at least one Library then you would be able to then add that site column to other lists and libraries on that site but it kind of has to like that's the way that publishing works now like we used to be able to just directly publish but we can't we have to do it through this this these steps so you would have to like again add it to a content type add that content type to at least one list or Library depending on what it is on your site then you'll have that site column to use wherever you need to on your site but you have to do those steps so that's just a weird gotcha but I want you guys to be aware because I've run into it and then the second one real quick is why is my content type not showing up if you go to add through the new modern interface if you click like add content type and you're not seeing it in that drop down biggest thing usually is you didn't hit publish so just want to make good sure go back to the content type Hub hit publish more than likely it'll show up and then the third thing Laura if you want to go back to the site real quick I'll show you how you can kind of troubleshoot like that that template showing up that you were seeing so if you go to your site settings I gotta go to the site settings for the correct site the one that where it wasn't working right yeah and I'm not saying this will work but this is what I would try first in case you run into this yourself and then look for content type publishing am I see your screen's blurry for me so it's hard for me to see I think it's under site collection settings yeah so then if you go here you can do this like refresh and then click ok and then that should hopefully like give it a few minutes and then that should refresh that content type from that change so that's just a little trick if you guys run into where you make a change in the content type of you're not seeing it then go there and do that and that usually helps that was the last slide right so do you want to go over see I think so a couple people had questions let's see um what about adding you as excitement of the sites and I'm not sure what um I'm going backwards through the questions um we're talking about where you would add um a site column you were talking about the fact that you just now the troubleshooting thing where you have to add the content type somewhere on the site to be able to add a site column so if you wanted to just add a site column to a list or Library you would have to go into this section right here and click add from existing site columns I just want to kind of point out where that was because that's not in like the modern interface and so this is where you would see um these are the notice that these two are a couple of those site columns that I had created that um got pushed out so now that I refresh that other one this is the one that I refreshed I think wait let me see no this is the one that I refreshed let me go back to policies and see if now it's like finished you know getting that actual policy file no not yet so I think that's based on like an old school like a timer job so it's just going to take probably a few minutes um but yeah as a recap you can uh create your content types across multiple like all of your different sites if you create them in the content type Hub and then once you've created them a content type Hub then to add them to a list or library and remember we've only showed libraries today you can do this for lists too then to add them to the list or Library you do that here and then the content type contains all the columns that you want but if it's a document if it's a file you can put the actual template of the file in that main content type 2 and then if you again just on one site if you want to standardize your columns across multiple lists or libraries then you could just only create in that site some people here like might have might not have the ability to make like Global site admin SharePoint admin type changes like ever because of you know government tenants or something like that are very strict companies and then that would be where a situation where might be stuck by you know just having to create them on each site but um for that like rolling up through search results and stuff like that they have to be Global yeah yeah and I would just say again like you this isn't a requirement you know you don't have to do this it's really just if you have these different scenarios that we were kind of pointing out where you needed across multiple things that's really where this comes into play but if you only need it in one library and that's all you need it then just do it as you've been doing it like it's there's no problem with that um it's just really in these grander things where we need multiple things across multiple sites and we need to really dig into like search customizations that's where this stuff can be handy yeah so there well we'll go over the questions there there are a few like kind of random and some off-topic questions in the list of questions but we'll go ahead and hang up but we'll go ahead and kind of look at your questions and see what else we can address like um someone's asking about my chair so so we'll uh we'll stay in the chat for a few minutes but we're going to go ahead and wrap it up let me um switch back over to this real quick so uh thanks Joelle that was awesome that was a very well put together presentation way better than mine usually are because I don't usually do slides so thanks for putting together it was lovely and um that was a fun little co-presentation also we have a big power apps free weekend coming up the weekend of March 24th through 26th so that's three days so it's actually a three day weekend Friday Saturday Sunday and that is um the year 2023 March 24th if you're watching this later but um you just go to iwmentor.com and there is a little Forum there's a little pop-up that says fill it out you know fill out a form to go ahead and sign up for powerapps weekend um and it is just a free weekend of our Advanced powerapps Training which is about 12 11 or 12 hours of training content with labs and quizzes and certificate and all kinds of fun stuff so um and it is free all weekend so sign up and we're looking forward to teaching you powerapps so thanks for coming today thanks for the Lively conversation see you all later

Channel: Laura Rogers, Microsoft MVP

Views: 10,472

Keywords: Microsoft 365, SharePoint, content types, documents, templates, collaboration, metadata

Id: 0K_x-aYaVWk

Length: 62min 15sec (3735 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 09 2023