In Office and SharePoint 2007 we had the capability of creating a content type that was intelligent – one that allowed you to specify fields in your document and have those promoted to the SharePoint library the content type is in. In fact, I wrote about this in my “Managing Enterprise Metadata with Content Types” whitepaper that I wrote for Microsoft. However, in that whitepaper I only talked about how to do the creation of the content type from the user interface – you couldn’t pick this content type up and move it from one site collection to another. Of course in SharePoint 2010 you can use the Managed Metadata Service but that requires server – and a connection between farms. What if you want to pickup a content type and move it from one farm to another that aren’t connected – or if you don’t have server.

The good news is that the tools in Visual Studio 2010 are much better than in Visual Studio 2008. I put together a video as a part of my work for SharePointPro Summit. The video shows how to create a new hire form and then turn that into a package that can be redeployed.

Take a look at how easy it is with the new tools to Create a Content type and package it.