Properties provide information about, as well as a way to search for, documents and objects in your portal. For example, you might want to create an Author property so users can find all the documents or objects created by a particular user.
This topic discusses:
To learn how to create or edit administrative objects (including properties and content types), see Creating and Editing Administrative Objects.
To access portal utilities (including the Global Object Property Map, the Global Document Property Map, and the Global Content Type Map), click Administration and, in the Select Utility drop-down list, select the utility you want to access.
The Global Object Property Map displays all the types of portal objects with which you can associate properties. When users create a portal object, they can specify values for the associated properties on the Properties and Names page of the object's editor.
When users import documents into the portal (either manually or through a content crawler), property values can be extracted from the source documents according to property mappings you specify in the Global Document Property Map and content types.
When a user imports a document into the portal, the portal performs the following actions:
The portal determines which content type to use, based on the Global Content Type Map or the content crawler's content type settings.
The portal populates property values based on the property mappings in the content type.
If there are additional mapped properties in the Global Content Type Map (not included in the content type's property mappings), the portal populates the property values, based on those property mappings.
Therefore, you can map common properties in the Global Document Property Map and specify only special mappings, default values, and override values in content types.
Note: Some property mappings are set when the portal is installed so that the portal can produce some general metadata even if you do not create any specialized mappings.
Content types specify several options:
Source content format, such as Microsoft Office, Web page, or Lotus Notes document
Whether the text of the content should be indexed for searching
How to populate values for document properties
You should create a separate content type for each unique combination of these options. For example, if departments use different Microsoft Word attributes for document descriptions, you might have to create one content type that pulls the description from the Subject attribute and one that pulls it from the Comments attribute.
The Global Content Type Map provides the default content type mappings for content crawlers. Content type mappings show content crawlers how to assign content types to imported content. When a content crawler finds a new document, it starts at the top of the document type mappings and looks for an extension that matches that document. The content crawler uses the content type that is mapped to the first matching extension.
When users create content crawlers, the content type page initially displays the mappings you specify in the Global Content Type Map; these settings can then be customized for the individual content crawler.
The Global Document Property Map provides default mappings for properties common to the documents in your portal. As mentioned previously, these mappings are applied subsequent to the mappings in the content type.