One of the great things about Office 365 is how fast you can create sites for the organization. All of the rich features available to you from on-premise installations are still available to you with Office 365. One of these great features is the ability to publish Content Types across multiple site collections.
When you are configuring an on-premise SharePoint farm you have full control of the service applications and you can configure the location of the site collection that will be the hub for your managed metadata service application. With Office 365 this is configured for you. To access your content type hub you simply need to navigate to the site collection with the URL of http://domain.sharepoint.com/sites/ ContentTypeHub. You will notice that this site collection is based off of the team site template and looks very similar to other sites that you have created.
If you access the site collection features you will notice that the “Content Type Syndication Hub” feature has been activated.
This means that as you add content types to this site collection you will be able to select to publish them to the rest of the site collections you create within your Office 365 implementation.
Once you select the Publish option your Content Type will be added to the job that syncs content types across all site collections. I am not sure they have published official numbers of when this job runs for Office 365, but the default value for an on-premise installation is hourly. Once the job has completed you will be able to see the published content type from any site collection. To quickly see all published content types, access site settings, and then the Site Collection Administration link for Content Type publishing.
If you need to read up on the value of content types, here are some links to get you up to speed:
- Content Type and Workflow Planning : http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262735.aspx#section1
- Managing Content Type Publishing: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint-server-help/manage-content-type-publishing-HA101631502.aspx?CTT=1
Jennifer Ann Mason 