A look at content type hubs in SharePoint Online (Office 365)

CoreyRoth — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 02:29:02 GMT

For those of you familiar with SharePoint 2010, the content type hub is nothing new to you. However, in SharePoint Online, the content type hub works a little differently. The first thing to know is that a content type hub has been set up automatically for you. You just have to know where to find it. You can’t get to it from Tenant Administration like you might expect. Instead, you can find the location by going to the Site Settings page of any site collection and then the Content Type Publishing link. You will see a screen like the one below which links directly to the content types of a site collection containing your hub.

From here you will learn that your content type hub is located in a site collection named /sites/contentTypeHub. Clicking on the link from this page will allow you to view the content types in the hub. One issue I have noticed here though is that only the original Office 365 account creator has access to the site collection. Accessing it with another user will get you an access denied error message even if you are a global administrator.

Unfortunately, you cannot fix this yourself from the tenant administration page because this site collection does not show up on the list. This means you need to get the person who created the original Office 365 account to go to this site collection and add you as a site collection administrator. It’s easy to fix but it requires you to involve whomever set up the account to begin with.

Once you get into the content type hub, you can create and publish your desired content types just like you would in SharePoint 2010. When you publish a content type, you should see it in the other site collections within a few minutes.

Working with the content type hub is easy. Try it out with your account today. These examples were demonstrated with an E3 account.

A look at the list editor in Visual Studio 11

CoreyRoth — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 01:28:10 GMT

I’ve written a number of posts in the last couple of weeks about the new SharePoint features in the Visual Studio 11 developer preview. These posts include publishing to SharePoint Online, Visual Web Parts, Silverlight Web Part, and the Content Type Editor. I’ll wrap up this series with a look at the new list editor. The list editor looks fairly similar to the content type editor actually. You start by choosing the List SharePoint Project Item from the New Item menu.

Selecting the List SPI will take you to the next screen where you have the choice of creating a new list which is based off of an existing list (i.e. tasks or document library) or to create a new instance of an existing list type.

Once it is complete, you will see the list editor where you can edit site columns and content types. The site column editor works very similar to the one used for new content types.

The only difference in this interface is that you can actually create new list columns here. If you click the Content Types button at the bottom, you will see a window allowing you to select content types from those available on the server as well as in your current project.

After you have set your content type, the site columns of the content type will automatically be added to the site column list. From here, you can click on the Views tab to edit the existing views (or add a new one). You’ll notice that all views are visible (including ones you normally wouldn’t touch). Be careful with what you do here. You can customize the columns in each view. Unfortunately, the user interface doesn’t give you any control over how things look, row groupings, or sort order though.

Finally, the Common Properties tab lets you set the title, URL, description, whether the list is hidden or not and on the Quick Launch bar.

Once you have finished your list, you can deploy it to a local SharePoint server or publish it to SharePoint Online. When you visit the site, an instance of the list will be there ready to go.

That’s just a quick look at what you can do with Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview. If you haven’t checked it out yet be sure and visit the developer center on MSDN.

Corey Roth [MVP] : Office 365, SharePoint, ECM, Office 365 Grid

A look at content type hubs in SharePoint Online (Office 365)

A look at the list editor in Visual Studio 11