Hidden Content Type Hub on Office365 Tenants
This is a simple thing, but because at the moment it’s sort of invisible, you may need a little help understanding it.
The Content Type Hub is a nice capability that lets you create your Site Columns and Content Types in one centralized Site Collection for syndication across your farm. It’s an excellent idea to use it so that your Content Types have consistent definitions and set up across those Site Collections.
In an on premises farm, you’d create a Site Collection to play this role and activate the Content Type Syndication Hub Site Collection Feature.
However, if you try to do this on Office365 in SharePoint Online, you may get an ugly error. Even if you don’t get an error, you may be creating a redundant Content Type Hub.
This is because there is a Content Type Hub Site Collection already provisioned (in the tenants I can see) at /sites/contentTypeHub. You should probably use this Site Collection for your Content Type Hub if it is there.
Unfortunately, this Site Collection isn’t visible in the admin dashboard listing of Site Collections.
To determine if you have this Site Collection, you can go to the /sites/contentTypeHub URL. However, a more conclusive test is to go into Site Settings on one of your existing Site Collections (probably the root one) and click on Content Type Publishing.
On that page, you’ll see a link to the Site Collection that is acting as the Content Type Hub, if there is one:
Do you know of a way to programmatically “publish” content types from the hub in O365? It makes auto-provisioning of content types a non-starter if I have to go into each one via the UI and publish it manually.
Derek:
I don’t know of a way to do this, but I’m sure there’s a way via one of the APIs.
M.
Hi Derek,
I came across this problem a while back, it’s not exposed through the API but I wrote a set of functions to do it using the WebRequestExecutorFactory, based on some great work by Jeffrey Paarhuis.
Here’s the GIST, it assumes some knowledge of PowerShell + CSOM. Keep meaning to blog about it but not found the time!
https://gist.github.com/tobiaswest/921d3d0ea8d63947b609
I’m a big proponent of the Content Type Hub, but I have had problems in Office 365 with the publishing (especially updates) taking many hours to cascade to the sites. It has made content type creation and testing a pain.
Kevin:
The unpredictability of the synching is definitely problematic. Some of us MVPs have been proponents of exposing at least the state of the timer jobs so that we can get some sort of handle on when a sync *might* occur. As it is, it’s make changes and wait…
M.
Hi Marc, how’s the status about this topic today? I’m now on SharePoint Online and wondering where are the subscribtions and updates. When I look on the content type, the publishing was several hours ago. But in any of the other SiteCollections which should consume it, there’s nothing. Waiting makes me grey and old…
@Florian:
AFAIK, there has been zero work done on the Content Type Hub. Going grey is the only recourse.
M.
Who knew? Thanks for posting Marc
Great stuff again. Thanks for making time to write these articles. You will be my number one resource, Looking forward to more articles
The hidden hub works great on “sibling” site collections, but it doesn’t seem to want to publish to root (or it won’t let root subscribe to syndication) for me…
Any ideas on what might be going on there?
@Tim:
Content Types in the hub should be available to all Site Collections. You might want to put in a call to support.
M.
It seems that the content types are not published to the new O365 Group Sites. Do you have any idea if they should – and if not the if they never will?
@Lauri:d
I believe that is the case. Let me see if I can find a timeline for you.
M.
I’m finding the same limitation with O365 Group sites. It would be great it there was some doco on all of the limitations of O365 group sites compared to a standard SharePoint site. Please let me know if you know of a good resource for this.
There seems to be a topic on this in Uservoice
https://office365.uservoice.com/forums/286611-office-365-groups/suggestions/17118586-office-365-groups-content-type-hub-connection
Hello, so I ran into somewhat of an issue, I found that people have deleted content types out the hub without un-publishing them, no they are orphaned and I cant get to them
any idea how to delete them in SPO?