Sharepoint 2010 : Enterprise Content Management - Managed Metadata, Keywords and Tags

Conventionally, users have used folders for ages to organize their content. Folders give you a rich hierarchical view of the organization of your data. Where they fall short, however, is that in the real world sometimes one piece of content may belong in two or more folders. For instance, is buying a diamond ring for your girlfriend a financial decision or a romantic decision? The answer: it is both! (Of course, she doesn't think so, though!)

Another issue with folders is that they are somewhat inflexible. For instance, when a number of folders are set up, and they are populated with content, sometimes it becomes hard to reorganize them and the content between them. Think about this: when was the last time your organization was completely shuffled around? To get around all these challenges, the concept of tagging was invented. Tagging simply refers to marking your content with strings that are pertinent to the nature of the content. What is special, though, is that one piece of content can have as many strings as you want. For instance, rather than putting the diamond ring transaction in either the romantic folder or the financial folder, you simply mark it with both romance and finance tags; that way, it is findable under both.

Of course, these tags in any organization also need their own structure. The world of tagging usually is not black or white. On one end of the spectrum, the dictionaryterms) is maintained by a committee locked in a room in the basement somewhere! On the other end, users who are actually familiar with the content that they're working on need to have the ability to add to this dictionary of tags. The first instance in which the dictionary of these terms is controlled hermetically is commonly referred to as metadata taxonomy. The second instance, when participants of an organization who are familiar with the content type they're working on add terms to this dictionary, is referred to as folksonomies. of all these tags (perhaps a better word is

Also it is reasonable to expect that as the dictionary of terms, both formal and informal, grow, over time you would want to mark synonyms or even delete or deprecate terms.

In addition, between the range of committee-managed tags and completely open folksonomies, you might have a midrange in which you might want to assign administrators for certain terms sets. The bottom line is that such flexibility in tagging categorization of your data makes your data much more discoverable.

The good thing is that SharePoint 2010 allows you to address all these scenarios! Let's see how. At the heart of the tagging and metadata management infrastructure inside of SharePoint is the managed metadata service, which you can find in central administration. If you visit /_admin/ServiceApplications.aspx, you will see an instance of the managed metadata service provisioned for you (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. The Managed Metadata Service link in central admin

The managed metadata service also works in conjunction with the facilities in SharePoint used to synch content types across site collections. In addition to synching content types across site collections, the managed metadata service also allows you to publish and consume keywords from other metadata service instances as necessary. The other metadata service could potentially be located on a completely different SharePoint farm. While you could use the out-of-the-box instance of the managed metadata service, I'm going to demonstrate the process of setting up your own metadata service instance from scratch. Thus, select the out-of-the-box managed metadata service instance, and choose to delete it. In the ensuing dialog box that pops up, also choose to delete data associated with the service applications (see Figure 2).

Figure 2. Deleting the Managed Metadata Service link in central admin

Next, on the same screen choose to create a new managed metadata service. Choosing to create a managed metadata service will ask you a few basic questions: the name of the new managed metadata service, the database location in which the terms will be stored, an application pool, among other such questions. I choose to call my managed metadata service Winsmarts. Use the following settings for this service instance:

• Name: Winsmarts

• Database Name: Winsmarts_DB

• Leave the failover server blank

• Pick sp_admin as the application pool

• Leave the content type hub dialog box blank

At the bottom of Create new managed metadata service is an interesting question, shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3. Creating a new managed metadata service asking a question

With SharePoint 2010 you now have the ability to share and synchronize content types across site collections. For now, just leave the content type hub as blank and leave the two check boxes checked for now.

Once the managed metadata service is created, click it to access the term store management tool. Go ahead and add a few terms, as shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4. My Taxonomy

As you can see from the figure, I have set up a new group of terms called Financial. At a group level (Financial), I can choose to assign group managers or contributors. Contributors have the ability to edit terms and term set hierarchies within this group, and group managers can appoint other contributors as well.

At an individual term set level, you can specify a number of things:

• You have the ability to appoint an owner of a term set. The owner of the term set has the eventual responsibility of maintaining the term set.

• You have the ability to specify a contact e-mail address for the term set. Usually term sets that are locked down will need some ability for end business users to be able to contact the person who can accept suggestions for the term set. This contact e-mail address would be the person who receives all these suggestions.

• You have the ability to define stakeholders, who will be notified if any changes are made to the term set.

• You have the ability to define a close or open submission policy. A closed submission policy would restrict the ability to make changes to only owners of this term set. While this would keep the term set cleaner, it would put more responsibility on the term set owner to maintain the term set as it grows.

• Finally you have a simple check box that makes the term said available for tagging existing content.

I set up the expenses term set settings to look as shown in Figure 5.

Figure 5. Managing the Expenses term set

With your term set now set up, start using this term set in your SharePoint application. At http://sp2010, set up a list called My Expenses. This list will be based on the custom list site definition. Add another column in this list called Amount, which will be based on type currency. Now the idea is that as I start making expenses and documenting them in this list, I want to be able to tag them with the Expenses term set, which makes my content more discoverable. In order to be able to be able to tag the content, I need to add a managed metadata site column to my list. Most ECM features have been designed so they can be turned on or off in any site as a feature. In order to use managed metadata in a blank site definition site, run the following command:

stsadm -o activatefeature -url http://sp2010 -id 73EF14B1-13A9-416b-A9B5-ECECA2B0604C

					  

Once the feature is added, go ahead and add a new managed metadata column called Category, allow it to have multiple values, and point it to the managed term set Expenses. This can be seen as in Figure 6.

Figure 6. Pointing your managed metadata column to a term set

Now I'm going to add a new item to this list. You will see that as you start typing in the category from the metadata, SharePoint will prompt you with appropriate synonyms of the matching terms in the term set (see Figure 7).

Figure 7. The managed metadata term set is now available on your list items

Notice that I said synonyms! Back in central administration, add another term called Office Related. Then click Work Related and choose to merge the Office Related and Work Related terms. Now try adding another item into the My Expenses list. SharePoint is smart enough to prompt you with the actual tag even if you were trying to type the previous tag. This can be seen in Figure 8.

Figure 8. Synonyms in action

There are numerous other facilities in the metadata management of SharePoint 2010, including the ability to delete terms, mark terms as orphans, deprecate terms, or even visit the term store management tool under the site collection settings of http://sp2010.

Now assume that you have added a few items into your overall expense. How did metadata tagging make your content more discoverable? Under the site features, activate the Metadata Navigation and Filtering feature. Back in the My Expenses list, visit Metadata Navigation Settings under List Settings. Choose to configure the Navigation Hierarchies and the Configure Key Filter section to navigate and filter using the Category column, as shown in Figure 9.

Figure 9. Metadata navigation settings

Now visit the My Expenses list once again. Note that you now have the ability to browse for content using the tags that you specified earlier. This can be seen in Figure 10.

Figure 10. Navigating your data using collected metadata

The Key Filters section enables you to specify multiple tags as your filtering criterion (seeFigure 11).

Figure 11. Navigating your data using collected metadata: multiple tags

What is really compelling about this set up is that you can combine the metadata navigation and filtering with folders. Those folders can have unique permissions on them, and metadata navigation and filtering will start to present security trimmed content.

This is great, but one big downside of this approach was that the metadata term set was very tightly controlled by the metadata administrators. Sure, the metadata administrator could potentially delegate the term set administration to other users, but users who are familiar with the content will eventually want to suggest more terms. In other words, they will want to specify their own keywords to content all over SharePoint and perhaps filter by using those keywords as well.

The SharePoint metadata architecture allows for a loosely controlled metadata setup commonly referred to as folksonomies. You can set up any of the term sets to be open; then users can add their terms to an existing term set. One common example of this is the Enterprise keywords functionality that is built into SharePoint 2010 out of the box. To examine this, add a new document library and call it My Documents. Under Document Library settings, visit the Enterprise Metadata and Keywords Settings link, and choose to add Enterprise Keywords to this list and enable Metadata Publishing. Now choose to add a new document. You can add keywords to this newly added document using both the Document Information Panel (DIP) and the Edit Properties button on the ribbon in SharePoint 2010. The keywords will also surface under the Enterprise Keywords section of backstage view in Office applications. Figure 12 shows this view.

Figure 12. Backstage view in an Office application

Figure 13 shows the DIP in an Office application.

Figure 13. Document Information Panel in an Office application

Figure 14 shows Enterprise Keywords in a web browser.

Figure 14. Enterprise Keywords in Document Properties in the web browser

Curiously, these keywords seem to underline themselves as you type them. Not only that; as you try and reuse a keyword that you previously used, SharePoint will prompt you to pick from an existing keyword to let you create a new one (see Figure 15).

Figure 15. The interface prompting you to pick existing keywords before typing in a new one

What is happening behind the scenes is that whenever SharePoint encounters a new keyword, it adds it to the database behind the scenes, gives it an ID, and ties it to the document that you are editing in your site. But if you are typing in a keyword that SharePoint has already seen, then SharePoint will prompt you to pick from an existing keyword. Because the keywords are also built on the managed metadata infrastructure, all the metadata concepts such as hierarchies of keywords, synonyms, or deprecated or orphaned keywords. You can verify that by visiting the Keywords section under the System group of the Winsmarts metadata service in central administration, as shown in Figure 16.

Figure 16. Entered keywords being captured in the same taxonomy

In addition to such keywords, you also have the ability of tagging the content specifically for your needs. For instance, select the document that you just added and from the ribbon click the Tags and Notes button. You can now add some tags, as shown in Figure 17.

Figure 17. Entering new keywords

Interestingly, these tags are also driven from the same keywords group that the managed keywords are being driven from. One of the most interesting tags is the I Like It tag. There is an I Like It button on every single page and content inside of SharePoint, so clicking that button will simply add the I Like It tag to the associated content. As you tagging, rating, and liking the content all over SharePoint, this also surfaces in the activity feed in your site. My activity feed is shown in Figure 18.

Figure 18. My activity feed

Now others in the organization can choose to subscribe to the activity feed, and keep on top of the content that is interesting to me.