Everything I need to know about Sharepoint...

When I first started playing with it earlier this year, I was still thinking in the mind of a web designer. "Don't worry about content--build the design." I've done a 180; now I couldn't care less about the design. Everything needs to be about content, content, content.

I'm beginning to think that Content Types are the real key to Sharepoint. Even if you don't really "use" content types, you still use them. Every list uses a default content type. Content types have been really easy for me, as an Object minded developer, to pick up. You've got something that has properties, methods, and events. It inherits from it's base class. It can be a base class.

My new rule is that the most important thing to do when beginning to work with a department on an Intranet presence is to sit with them and define content types. Defining content is all about defining what properties need to go along with that piece of data. People seem to best understand this when I say that we use these properties to search, filter, and report on the data.