Default Column for all future content types

Question

I want to force the users of our company to identify the confidentiality level of each document that they upload into SharePoint. We haven't introduced SharePoint yet so there is currently no data in it. There are 4 confidentiality levels (A, B, C, D). Here are my questions:

1. Can I add a choice column to the default content type "Document" and have it a mandatory field?
2. If a user creates a new content type, I want the confidentiality level to be a column automatically so that I don't need to count on the user to add it to the content type definition.

This has to be applied to the entire site collection and to every future site, library and document type that will get created.

Thanks, Daniel

Answer 1

Yes, we can add choice column as mandatory column in the default document content type. Create a choice site column, then go to the site content type page, from there open the "Documents" content type, then add the newly created choice column to it.

For all future content type creation addition of confidentiality level choice column, the adding these to the document library - we can't automate this if we create manually - right from creation of content type to assignment to document library, we need to put a manual efforts.

So, to automate this process - just create a simple PowerShell script as a template, then you can use this script whenever you want to create new content type, document library. In the PowerShell script, read the input for content type, choice column, document library from the CSV file to make this process more dynamic.

Answer 2

It depends on what version of SharePoint you're on but look into the Content Type Hub. You can add the column to the document content type and it will propagate into every document content type in every site collection on your farm/tenet.