• Content Type Publishing Hub is a new feature in SharePoint 2010 whereby it allows a SharePoint administrator to have a central location where they can manage and publish content types from across all their SharePoint web applications
  • Other web applications can subscribe to the content type publishing hub and pull down published content types from the hub and receive updates on the published content types
  • Activated as a Site Collection Feature:
    • Enable-SPFeature -id ContentTypeHub -url “<site collection url>”

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  • Notice how it is called the Content Type Syndication Hub in the feature?
    • Just like RSS, Microsoft wants to give a feel of subscribing, pulling and pushing of content types
  • Content type hub is available to SharePoint web applications via the Metadata Service Application
  • As long as the web applications use same Metadata Service Application, the content types will be pushed to those web applications that are subscribed to it

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Configuring the Content Type Hub
Configuring the content hub is a little tricky and not very intuitive.  Here are some steps on how to do it.

  • Create the web application and the root site which you want it to be the Hub
  • Enable content type syndication feature
    In the Managed Metadata Service Application (Central Admin –> Application Settings –> Service Applications) properties (IN THE RIBBON), you can set the Content Type Hub URL
  • In the Managed Metadata Service Connection (Central Admin –> Application Settings –> Service Applications) properties (IN THE RIBBON), we explicitly tell to consume content types from the hub

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To Publish the Content Type to the Subscribers

Once the content type hub web application has been configured, you should see the “Manage publishing for this content type” option under each of the Site Content Type settings and have the ability to publish it.

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SharePoint admins have the option to publish, unpublish or republish the content type they have selected.

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**Note: By default, the hub is controlled by 2 timer jobs.  In order to receive published content types immediately, run the following two timer jobs:

1) Content Type Hub
2) Content Type Subscriber (of web application which is going to receive the content types updates)

After running these two timer jobs, the content types should be published and available to the subscribing sites

Published content types can be checked by going to Site Settings –> Site Collection Administration –> Content Type Publishing, here you have the option to refresh all content types, view any errors with content publishing and view the subscribed content types.

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So what are some reasons for content type publishing hubs for Records Management?

  • Globally used content types that are controlled in one location. 
  • This removes duplicate tagged documents and ensures consistent meta-data
  • Company has two web applications that have a set of content types that are the same (could be employee profile, real estate listing etc)
  • Company would like to have a central location where the content types can be created and pushed out to the above two site collections seamlessly and without having to make any modifications to separate site collection content types

The complete list of this series can be seen by the following links:

1. Introduction
2. Document IDs
3. Managed Metadata Service (Term Store)
4. In-Place Records Declarations
5. Site Collection Auditing
6. Content Organizer
7. Compliance Details
8. Hold and eDiscovery
9. Content Type Publishing Hubs
10. Multi-Level Retention
11. Virtual folders and metadata based navigation
12. Scaling
13. Send To…
14. Document Sets

References

http://www.chakkaradeep.com/post/SharePoint-2010-Content-Type-Hubs-e28093-Publish-and-Subscribe-to-Content-Types.aspx
http://www.whatsthepointofsharing.com/2009/11/28/how-to-publish-and-subscribe-to-content-types-in-sharepoint-2010/
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.sharepoint.spcontenttype(office.14).aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.sharepoint.spcontenttypecollection(office.14).aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.sharepoint.spcontenttypeusage(office.14).aspx

 

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