Content Type - Drew Madelung

Content types and columns use Groups to organize them. These are used so things are easier to find as there are a lot of default columns and content types (600+ columns and 80+ content types). As you turn on more features you will continue to get other content types and columns added to your site for you to use. You can access the site column and site content type through the Site Settings page.

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Once you go into either page you will see the information organized by Groups with a Show Groups drop down on the top right of the page to easily filter.

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What you WON’T see on either of these pages are a collection hidden content types and columns. A good example is the overall Title column for the Item content type. This is a very crucial column that is used across many site content types. So if you change the Title column at the site level, it will cascade to all of your content types and lists that are using that column. I have worked with many clients that did not fully understand what they were updating when they did this so it’s fairly common to see a field like this renamed. If you go into the site columns page you will not see this column because it is part of the _Hidden group. If I go in through site content types -> Item -> Title column, you will see that the column exists in the _Hidden group.

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To change the group of this column you can either select an existing group or create a new group.

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Once you make your changes the column or content type that you changed will now be viewable under the site columns or site content types page in the group that you selected.

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Now what if you wanted to change this back or add a new column or content type to the _Hidden group? When you go back to the edit page you will see that under the Existing group drop down you don’t have the _Hidden option.

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All you need to do is type “_Hidden” in the New group text box and it will move it into the _Hidden group and it will NOT create a new group.

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Now when you go back to the site columns or site content types page you will no longer see what you moved to the _Hidden group.

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The Office 365 Video portal is a great solution for managing videos. It is much better than trying to host videos in a standard site collection in SharePoint Online. I don’t want to go into the Office 365 Video portal in this post but here are some great starting points.

After using the Office 365 Video portal both internally and with clients there was one area that I wanted to try to improve on, searching and finding. The majority of clients I work with have a standard intranet with many now being hosted in SharePoint Online. When I help with intranet builds I try to incorporate the search center as a key piece of functionality. In Office 365, this is a prebuilt site collection under the URL – https://domain.sharepoint.com/search.

With the search center, I try to include core metadata that can be used as refinement when possible. As the search center can be a central area for functionality I wanted to try to improve the usability of the current Videos vertical refiner with better incorporation of videos hosted in the Office 365 Video portal. Office 365 Videos are already returned in search results via this refiner but this will most likely also pull junk videos people have uploaded across SharePoint. So I was looking for a way to clean this up.

A simple solution to hide junk videos is to promote all videos that are hosted in the Office 365 Video portal above any other items being returned through the Videos search results through a query rule.

Here was our search center before…

Here is our search center after…

As you can see the videos that we want people to see are now front and center. I also added the Content Type refiner so people could pick other Content Types besides Cloud Video.

Steps to build the query rule

** As a reference I am building this query rule just on the Search site collection. This could be done at the tenant level as well. **

Navigate to your search center as someone who has site collection administration
- https://domain.sharepoint.com/search
Use the gear to go to Site Settings. Under Site Collection Administration click Search Query Rules
Click the Select a Result Source… drop down and select Local Video Results (System)
Click New Query Rule
Give it a name (i.e. Video Portal Promotion)
Under Query Conditions, click Remove Condition. We are selecting this because we want this to fire on all events.
Under Actions, click Change ranked results by changing the query
Under the Sorting tab, change the Sort by to be by Rank
On the same sorting tab, click Add dynamic ordering rule
Now we get to change the ranking. On the first drop down select Manual condition. In the manual condition, we only want to return videos from the O365 video portal. To do this we will filter by the ContentTypeID. There is a new content type called “Cloud Video” that is published with videos in the O365 video portal. The last section of the ContentTypeID is not consistent across channels (site collections) but the beginning string is. Here is the condition:
- ContentTypeId:0x010100F3754F12A9B6490D9622A01FE9D8F012*
Ensure the last drop down states Promote to top and then click OK and Save.
Sit back and look at your great new query rule
Now if you run a search your good videos will always be before your bad videos

The last step you could do is add the Content Type option as a refiner. This is done through editing the page and editing the refiner web part.

With videos being available in search and the power of Display Templates in SharePoint, this could be just the start of integrating videos back into your SharePoint sites and user experiences.