Practical Application of Knowledge Management using SharePoint Content Types

The Scenario:  Organizations live in stove pipes.  Often this is in the form of departments responsible for different competencies such as accounting, finance, market, information technology, and management.  Interdependency and overlap are overlooked in organizing the intellectual property produced.  All departments produce ‘Products,’ so we need to create a content type in SharePoint to bridge the gaps.  The ‘Products’ content type needs to be created and the appropriate metadata columns assigned.

To make it happen we must set up a site collection level content type and inherit throughout all the sites that create ‘products.’  Once we have the content type established, it’s easy to associate with document libraries and subsequently create templates for re-usability.

Some unique challanges that arise deal with handling large document libraries, the size of your content databases, and synching content types across site collections.  Managing large lists and traversing content types should be much easier in SharePoint 2010, I have my fingers crossed.

In conclusion, setting up content types at an enterprise level pays off in organzation that produce thousands of documents.  Do you have individuals that want to search documents within this date range that transcends departments pertaining to ‘X?,…’ no problem.

The technology is a slam dunk, the art is in the vision.