Using Content Type to Hide Default Issue/Risk columns from Input Form

In my previous blog, Create/Manage Issue/Risk list centrally, i talked about How to create and manage Issue list centrally and how it helps the administrator to save lot of unwanted work. In this post i will explain another one of the great advantage you could achieve if you use content type to manage the lists. One of the frequently recieved clients request is: How to hide/remove default Issue/Risks columns from the Project site? Now you might wondering that what is so difficult about this :) but this is a tricky part, because removing/changing the default Issue/Risk list columns can cause you lot of trouble. But the good news is that you can do this without any issues if you are using content type, below are the steps for you:

1. Create Issue list content type, please follow my previous blog to create the content type.
2. Once created, go back to the list settings, and click on content type:

3. Here you will see all the default and custom columns we have added in the content type earlier, click on the one you want to hide from the form, in my case i will click on the "category" column:

4. And there you can set it to Hidden from the column settings:

And if you can now go and add new item to the Issue list, you will notice that category column appears no more on the form to bother the users. 

*23-0-2013**Update**
This is to update that there is an exception to the above process, i.e. hiding any of the default fields of Issues/Risks list available on project site. That even hiding of some fields can result in queue error, to be precise its the Links column available on these sites. Hiding this column cause queue error similar to the deletion of columns, so you need to leave this column as is in order to avoid queue errors.

Thanks to Dan Stopher, of EPM Partners, for finding this culprit :) Please see his blog for more details about the exception.

Posted in: Project Server- Content Type