Written By: Virgil Carroll
Posted: 9/16/2012
Content types will help improve organization on a page by segmenting the content to only display what is relevant and necessary. This can provide a way for users to only see the content that is necessary to them and/or the task they are working on. When using content types you need to make sure to stay organized so things don’t build up.
Transcript+
Speaker 1: One of the things that many of us uses as good practices in our SharePoint implementation is content types. We use content types to structure information into more organizable components when we have different information we need to collect from the different types and we may have a lot of different things that we want. Overall, what we’re really trying to do is we’re trying to better segment out our content.
One of the things I always see that creates just an unbelievable usability nightmare on this is people not doing this very well. Otherwise, people not really paying attention to what they’re doing as they’re adding multiple content types. What you can see here is actually in this list, you can see all these different fields that are actually showing up on this page for a part of this page content type and you’ll see that there’s actually some other content types that you can select in this edit form here and that actually don’t have as many fields to them as they can as the page layout does.
What typically happens is that as we add new content types and we add fields in there, all of a sudden, we get this whole scenario where one of the content types or multiple of the content types really have a lot of fields on them that are absolutely unnecessary and not something that we actually want to use, show, or use on it, but because of either inheritance or maybe because when you added another one, you said “Yeah,” automatically add that to all content types in that. You go through this. This is a very, very common scenario that we see a lot.
What do we do with that? One of the first things we want to do is really just show the information and the content type that really needs to show so you can see in this implementation. Actually a lot of those items that in this list were automatically tagged with the page content type actually had been skipped in being used just for the pieces that you actually need along with the page and information is much more segmented. What do you get with that, well, what you do is you get a much cleaner form, much easier for users to work with, and they’re only working with the things they absolutely need to.
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More About Virgil
Virgil Carroll is the owner and president of High Monkey – based in Minneapolis Minnesota. Virgil also wears the multiple ‘hats’ of Principle Human Solutions Architect and SharePoint Architect.
Virgil is one of those rare individuals who can dive deep into technical topics while speaking clearly to the business owners of a project and never forgetting that the end user experience has the highest priority. He calls it using both sides of his brain. Virgil is passionate about leveraging technologies ‘out of the box’ as much as possible with a focus on the strategic use of content to create websites that deliver the right content to the right audience on the right device at the right time. Virgil brings high energy, an ironic wit, and a sense of grounded perspective whenever he speaks to an audience. Virgil regularly speaks at conferences and user groups throughout the United States and occasionally in Europe.