Content Types and Site Columns
To facilitate best practices in content management, we started with a good base of Site Columns and Content Type which could be reused across the Intranet. These fundamental building blocks ensured consistent metadata for all content as well as providing clean, centralized management capabilities.
Page Layouts to Set the Stage For Variations
In the first phase, we did not deploy variations to handle different languages or bandwidth options, but the client wanted to be in a good position to do so in the future. Because of this, we used page layouts extensively, which will allow for more rapid migration to variations when they decide to do so.
Data View Web Parts to Expose Content
Using a centralized content repository allowed us to display content items across the application in as many places as were appropriate based on the metadata tagging. So, for example, if an Operational Brief was tagged as having been created by the New York office, as relevant to Laos and Sri Lanka, and as having to do with Coordination Mechanisms, then that document is displayed in each of the sites: New York, Laos, Sri Lanka, and Coordination Mechanisms. Each site, based upon its site type, has a different set of metadata about that document displayed which is determined by what will be the most useful metadata in that context.
We used Data View Web Parts extensively to enable this functionality and also abstracted out the XSL into separate, componentized files for easy reuse.
Scripting to Add Business Rules
SharePoint’s out of the box content entry forms enforce data integrity at the column (field) level, but do not provide ways to enforce integrity among columns. By using JavaScript on the entry forms, we were able to implement inter-column relationships without losing the inherently strong out of the box forms capability for disparate Content Types.