12/28/2011
Now, metadata tagging has been a feature in SharePoint for some time—long enough to surface some common pain points. Since metadata columns are defined in lists and libraries, and many organizations have hundreds or even thousands of lists and libraries, the need and desire to “reuse” columns in multiple libraries is extremely common. It makes sense: If we are going to define “attributes” about the documents in one library, it stands to reason that it’s very likely those are the same attributes we may want to use to classify documents in other lists or libraries (either within the same site or across different sites). For example, let’s say we created a column intended to define which of our 16 regional offices a library’s documents were relevant to. Further, it is a best practice to try to use “choice” column types rather than free text columns as much as possible for some control on user tagging. It’s common practice to do this in databases so we can control user input, so do it in SharePoint also (imagine the pain filtering for documents tagged “US”, “U.S.A.”, and “USA” for America). Because columns are defined at the list and library level, you would normally create the column in the list/library and configure it with the appropriate choices and options. What happens when you want to also tag events on a calendar list with the same regional office relevance? Re-creating the column would be a pain, but more than that, updating the column to reflect a newly opened regional office as a choice would mean updating many columns in many lists or libraries—it’s not a scalable option, even in a small SharePoint deployment. In MOSS 2007, Microsoft tried to help by allowing us to create columns at the “site” level that could be reused in any list or library in the site. This was fine as long as you had relatively few sites, but again, let’s take our “Regional Offices” column. It would likely be relevant in every site of the farm, so again, we were faced with lots of manual work to set up and maintain this column. Fortunately, we could leverage a tool like DocAve Deployment Manager to easily replicate site columns (and many other design elements like Content Types, List and Site Templates among others) to all of the relevant sites in our farm. In Microsoft SharePoint 2010, Microsoft greatly improved the features available to “reuse” metadata across sites and site collections with the addition of Managed Metadata, Enterprise Keywords, and External Data columns. Managed Metadata is a new SharePoint “service application” that allows administrators to define “term sets”, a hierarchical set of attributes that can be made available in any list or library in any site (this is often referred to as a taxonomy). When enabled in a list or library, a user can tag content by associating it with one or more terms in the term set. These term sets can be “closed”, that is, users are forced to select from the pre-defined terms (this keeps tight control over user input), or they can be “Open” to allow users to either select from the defined terms or enter a term of their own which then becomes part of the term store and available for selection by all other users. Administrators can also set up “synonyms” so that they can funnel multiple similar terms into a single value, so for “America”, you could type in “US”, “U.S.A.”, or “USA” and it would go to the same value. Another valuable feature is the ability to merge terms after the fact – for example, two divisions of your company, Advertising and Marketing, become one after a corporate restructuring. We could merge the “Advertising” term into the “Marketing” term and, just like that, all content tagged “advertising” will now reflect the new classification. This is extremely powerful! SharePoint 2010 doesn’t stop there, though. As powerful as a structured taxonomy is, it can also be valuable to see what our users want to say about their content with no guidance from us. How would they classify a particular piece of content? What do they “like” or find useful among all the information resources in SharePoint? “Enterprise Keywords” allow us to provide users a column to say anything they want about a particular piece of content. Any values that they enter in this column then become an option for other users to select as a tag for other content. What we’re doing here is allowing the masses to tell us what this content is. This creates a “folksonomy” that is created from the “bottom up” and pairs very nicely with our dictated taxonomy that we drive from the top down. I’m out of space in this post – next time we’ll continue with managing the Managed Metadata service and another powerful information classification tool: Content Types.