Synchronizing Content Types with the Content Type Publishing Hubs
While creating a new instance of the Managed Metadata Service, you must have noticed a section to configure the Content Type hub. Another essential function of the Managed Metadata Service is to allow you to share content types across site collections and web applications. Historically, in SharePoint, content types were restricted to use only within a site collection. Using content types consistently across a farm was troublesome and not supported as well. Fortunately, things have changed in SharePoint 2010, and the Managed Metadata Service now makes this possible.
Content type synchronization across site collections is based on a hub and spoke model. A content type publishing hub acts as a central location for content type management and publishing. Spoke site collections subscribe to content type publishing for receiving updates to the published content types and update their local copy accordingly.
Try It Yourself: Configure Content Type Synchronization
1. Create two site collections, content type publishing hub (at the root level) and spoke site collection (at the /site/Spoke level).
2. Activate the Content Type Syndication Hub site collection feature in the hub.
3. Next activate the feature with the ID 73EF14B1-13A9-416b-A9B5-ECECA2B0604C on the spoke site collection using the following stsadm command:
stsadm -o activatefeature
-url http://splearn/sites/spoke
-id 73EF14B1-13A9-416b-A9B5-ECECA2B0604C
4. Visit Central Administration, Managed Service Applications and look for the My Managed Metadata Service created earlier.
5. Select the service and click Properties. If you remember the Content Type Hub section was left blank earlier while you created a new instance of the service. Now populate the content type hub field with your Content Type Publishing Hub’s URL.
6. Click OK and view the properties for My Managed Metadata Service Connection, which is located right underneath the My Managed Metadata Service instance.
7. Check the Consumes Content Types from the Content Type Gallery at http://splearn/ Check box on the Properties page as shown in Figure 12.21.
Figure 12.21. Configuring Managed Metadata Service Connection
8. Now you need a content type in the Content Type Syndication Hub site collection, which you want to synchronize with the spokes. For this, create a new content type and call it MyDocumentContentType, inheriting from the out-of-the-box Document content type.
9. Next visit the content type setting page for this content type and select the Manage Publishing for This Content Type option.
At this point you see the three publishing options as shown in Figure 12.22. Since you have not published this content type before, the options to Unpublish and Republish are disabled at this time. Also, the Last Successful Published Date is empty for the same reason.
Figure 12.22. Publishing the MyDocumentContentType
10. Go ahead and publish the content type. At this stage you would expect the content type to be published and available for spokes to pull as an update. Not so fast. Two timer jobs should run to do this for us, and by default they run at an interval of 15 minutes. Unless you want to wait for 15 minutes, run these jobs manually and get your work done.
11. Navigate to Central Administration, Monitoring, Review Job Definitions (under Time Jobs), and select the Content Type Hub timer job definition. Click the Run It Now button.
12. Once the job executes, the Last Successful Published Date field on the Manage Publishing for This Content Type page gets populated, as shown in Figure 12.23.
Figure 12.23. Last Successful Published Date gets populated after running the Content Type Hub timer job.
13. Once the Last Successful Published Date is populated, run the Content Type Subscriber job, which is by default scheduled to run hourly. This job would cause the spokes to get the published updates from the hub.
14. Now visit the Content Type Publishing link in the spoke site collection under the Site Collection Administration links. This lists all the subscribed content types. Notice that MyDocumentContentType should now be listed here as well, as shown in Figure 12.24.
Figure 12.24. MyDocumentContentType appearing in the list of subscribed content types
If you visit the Site Content Types under the galleries, as you would expect, MyDocumentContentType is visible there as well. But if you click the content type, you find that the content type is read-only. This is because any changes to the content type should now be made from the hub site collection and therefore modifications are not allowed at the spoke site collection’s level. At this stage if you unpublish the content type by selecting the Unpublish option as shown in Figure 12.23 and rerun the Content Type Hub and Content Type Subscriber jobs, as you would expect, the content type is removed from the list of subscribed content types, as shown in Figure 12.24. However, this does not cause the content type to be deleted from the spoke site collection. In fact the content type would present and would become available for editing.