Planning Content Type Hubs in SP2010

when you are developing enterprise application for large organization some fields are common across all brands such as brand name, brand logo, SEO title, SEO description etc..

How will you handle this common fields across farms?

Scenario (P&G only for reference)

Assume that we are designing architecture for P&G products, normally P&G has lot of products (Pantene, Olay, pampers etc...)but, all these products have some common fields such as Product logo, product name, SEO title, SEO description etc... How will you handle this?

SharePoint 2007

In SharePoint 2007 usually what we do? we go and create separate content type for this called brand content type and deploy this into site collection but, here the problem is we need to go to each and every web application and install site content type feature , there is no central location to place common fields, in future if you want to update particular column, you have to go to each and every web application and update

SharePoint 2010

In SharePoint 2010 there is a new concept called Content Type Hubs, through this you can manage all common fields centrally and publish it to the other web applications, so in 2010 the other web applications can subscribe these content types and pull down the published content types from the CTH and also can get updates when ever changes happened in published content types

Here, mainly you need to concentrate on three things

Site collection to host the content types and act as a Content Type Hubs

Managed metadata service application( to expose content type hub to each and every web application)

Web applications ( to subscribe content type hubs)

Advantages

No need of going to each and every web application and installing the content types and if you want to do updates on particular content type you can simply do it on Content Type Hubs and push it down, so managing the content types easy

In reality the content types changes frequently like adding new fields or creating new content type etc... It's easier to coordinate this from a single location and make sure that xml files are correctly set up across all web applications/farms.