Microsoft SharePoint provides several types of Library; Document, Form, Picture, Translation Management are amongst some of them. Content Types can form part of these libraries allowing uniformed meta data, templates, policies and workflows to form a document type. For example in a Sales environment you may have document types such as Proposal, Commission Claim, Invoice, Product Brochure and so on. Each type of document may have different meta data associated with it. The content Types are available throughout a site collection if they are created at the top level site, and are available from any site and all sub sites if they are created in a sub site.
The below diagram displays where a content type may be used:
Using the Lightning Conductor Web Part – you may want to roll up all documents from all document libraries of a certain content type. Out of the Box content types include: Document, Picture, Form, Page etc. Information Workers can create their own content types that inherit from these. For example Proposal would inherit from Document. So you can set the Lightning Conductor Web Part to roll up any document in any document library that uses the Proposal Content Type or even any Content Type that is based upon Proposal as well by choosing the check box ‘Include Child Content Types’. The Lightning Conductor Web Part allows you to also filter on the meta data, and display the meta data in the web part. You may also Group, sort and provide functions on the meta data.
Below is a screenshot of the LCWP settings allowing you to roll up from Libraries and Content Types:
