Is it possible to publish site columns via the content type hub or does it only deal with content types?

Thanks in advance.

Site columns only get pushed out when they are attached to a content  type. Which means that you can create the column on the hub but it won't get exported until it's attached to a content type which is published.

At that point the column will be taken over to the subscriber site and you can use it as you wish. I tend to create a single (descriptively titled) dummy CT to carry any columns that are needed out to the subscriber sites.

• Proposed as answer by Cimares Friday, May 24, 2013 1:13 PM
• Marked as answer by zazie Friday, May 24, 2013 1:46 PM

Site columns only get pushed out when they are attached to a content  type. Which means that you can create the column on the hub but it won't get exported until it's attached to a content type which is published.

At that point the column will be taken over to the subscriber site and you can use it as you wish. I tend to create a single (descriptively titled) dummy CT to carry any columns that are needed out to the subscriber sites.

• Proposed as answer by Cimares Friday, May 24, 2013 1:13 PM
• Marked as answer by zazie Friday, May 24, 2013 1:46 PM

Thanks, Alex.

I've put the site columns in a content type as you suggested, run the hub timer jobs and they've come through as hoped.

(Well they've arrived in one site collection and now the content type subscriber job is stuck but that's a different matter!)

If you've got a reasonable sized Site Collection and a lot of content types being published it can take a long time to complete. My record is 8 hours in a production environment when we updated 100 odd CTs at once...

Site columns only get pushed out when they are attached to a content  type. Which means that you can create the column on the hub but it won't get exported until it's attached to a content type which is published.

At that point the column will be taken over to the subscriber site and you can use it as you wish. I tend to create a single (descriptively titled) dummy CT to carry any columns that are needed out to the subscriber sites.

Alex,

Any idea why a site column that is getting pushed out by attaching it to a content type isn't getting registred as a Crawled Property (after using the column in another site and a full crawl)?

Thanks.

Not off the top of my head no. Is there any data in that column? Blank ones will be ignored I believe.

Not off the top of my head no. Is there any data in that column? Blank ones will be ignored I believe.

Thanks for the quick reply.

I added data in the metadata column to the sites where the content type/site column got published, I even added a document library on the content type hub site itself and added a dummy document with data in the site column.

Documents get indexed and can be found in search, but when I look at my crawled properties, the column isn't there.

Are you certain? I don't know how familiar you are with the 2010 crawl picture but the names are mangled slightly by the crawl process. Have you seen any other columns working?

Also in 2010 you also don't get automatically created mapped properties unlike 2013.

Are you certain? I don't know how familiar you are with the 2010 crawl picture but the names are mangled slightly by the crawl process. Have you seen any other columns working?

Also in 2010 you also don't get automatically created mapped properties unlike 2013.

I should have told you I'm talking about a 2013 (even though this is a SP2010 forum, didn't see that, sorry).

I have created the same site column without using the content type hub and then it get's created as a crawled property, but my goal was to have a dummy content type in the content type hub containing site columns that I want to use in other Site collections.