Managing Metadata in SharePoint 2010
Guest Author: Christian Glessner
iLove SharePoint
SharePoint 2010 comes with a bunch of web 2.0 features, tags, tag clouds, rating, social bookmarking and enhanced blogs and wikis. What I really missed in SharePoint 2007 were tags and tag clouds.
On the other hand this was a free space for developers like me, see Power Tag Cloud ;-) My experience with SharePoint 2003 already showed that text, dropdowns and lookup columns are too inflexible and people tend to over categorize in the conception stage.
Less is more!
This could lead to a confusing meta taxonomy. What we have learned from the web 2.0 wave in the last years is that tags and tag clouds are a great, simple and flexible way to organize information.
Now with SharePoint 2010 this and much, much more comes out of the box. Tagging becomes one of the most significant concepts for building enterprise taxonomies in SharePoint 2010.
What can be tagged?
- List Items
- Documents
- Pages (because there are documents ;)
- External pages
This means everything that has an URL can be tagged. Do you know anything on the web that hasn’t one?
Talked enough, let’s play around with this stuff…
Tag a list item or a document:
Almost any built-in list has, per default, a “Managed Keywords” column. When you start to write you get a filtered list of suggestions. When you enter a tag that does not exist it will be automatically added to the managed keywords list.
Tag and note a SharePoint page:
To tag a SharePoint page you can use the user’s context menu as shown above. Clicking “Tag or Note this Page” opens the following dialog.
You can tag the page just like the list item before, but in addition you will get a list of suggested tags and you can mark them as private, so other user will not see them. At the bottom of the dialog you see a tag and note history. Furthermore you can add notes to the page (see in the second tab on the top).
How to tag an external page?
For years I’ve withed for a tool from Microsoft to centrally manage bookmarks and I believe I’m not alone. To tag external pages you have to first add a link from the SharePoint tagging dialog to your browser’s favorites:
This adds the “Tags and Noteboard” bookmark (JavaScript) to your browsers favorites list. Now you tag an external page like this:
Clicking the “Tag and Noteboard” brings up the same dialog as in the previous example for a SharePoint page. You can tag and write notes as usual.
This looks similar to social bookmark tools like Diigo. But I miss some features like highlighting text, sticky notes, share bookmarks with a group, and a good browser plug-in. I hope this will come in later builds…
Tag Cloud Web Part
For sure you want to use your tags to navigate and filter content. For this reason there is now a tag cloud web part included in SharePoint 2010. I’m really a tag cloud fan :-)
My Tags and Notes
You can manage your tags globally as shown below.
Managing Enterprise Metadata
Everything you have seen above is not enough to build an enterprise taxonomy. You don’t want to let the users build your taxonomy on the fly with some tags. You want to predefine keywords and terms for your whole SharePoint farm. And what about multilingual terms and keywords? That’s why Microsoft added something called “Term Store Management Tool”:
Here you can delete or create new tags and terms centrally for the whole farm. There is also support for multilingual terms! In my current build I have a feeling this isn’t a completed feature yet (there is already some documentation on MSDN), so I’ll stop here and wait for further builds…
Although all this cool new web 2.0 features in SharePoint 2010, don’t forget that the most significant part to get this all rocking is your company’s culture! Are you ready for culture 2.0?
Guest Author: Christian Glessner
iLove SharePoint
Christian Glessner is the Head of Microsoft Development at Data One GmbH in Saarbruecken, Germany. With his long-term experience around .NET technolgies, he is a renowned expert for agile software development and passionate founder of the CodePlex project “I Love SharePoint” and the correspondent blog http://www.ilovesharepoint.com. With his repuation as a creative and unconventional thinker, his current focus topics include rapid development with SharePoint and dynamic languages and Nintex Workflow.
- Blog: http://iLoveSharePoint.com
- Twitter: http://twitter.com/cglessner
- Company: http://dataone.de
It really should be pointed out that metadata/keyword tagging is a not a web 2.0 feature and wasn’t created by the social networking movement. Tagging, in terms of documents or pages within SharePoint, is really more about targeted search against generic content just like the META KEYWORDS item of a standard html web page. Considering that FAST search is an integral part of 2010, and as search gets better and takes on much more powerful lemmatization abilities, targeted key word or metdata searches become much more important to restrict the results.
Does the tag cloud show the tags for items within the site, site collection, web app, farm or multiple farms?
yes tagging is great in SP2010 but the confustion is that the “Tag Cloud” does not sem to work well with the Sp2010 Blog template. One would think you could connect the two and export out the Blog tags to the tagCloud Web Part to surface the info. I have not yet been able to make that work… have you?
I think it is great that SP2010 is adding more Metadata features and tagging. However, in reality the tagging should be automated and transparent for the content creator at the point of creation ? The point of creation will be MS Office Word,Excel,PPT or outlook. For tagging to work in a business enviroment SP2010 needs to integrate Office with Term Store or for more complex taxonomies in larger Enterprise rollouts products like Metapoint from Schemalogic.
If not the tagging and metadata will fail in SP2010 as in other systems because of the failure to understand this is not a technical issue but a business use case problem.
Tagging and structure need to be done at the point of user creation, not in a Sharepoint screen.
Would welcome feedback
There are two possibilities that come to mind for tagging to be automated or transparent for the user. First item, transparency, Sharepoint 2010 Integration with Office 2010 includes a Document Information Panel or DIP. When someone opens the word document in this example, they are prompted just below the toolbar in Word to complete the metadata or tagging associated with the sharepoint Library. Second automation, setting metadata or tagging defaults values in Sharepoint lists, libraries, etc. certainly does the trick. The example here would be I work in HR and am uploading document, the set the default value for department to HR in the sharepoint library,
Basically I like the idea of an improved metadata management. But I’m not sure if the users are happy if they have to maintain the metadata. I think there will be some resistance to maintain metadata because of lack of time. I agree with you (George) that the tagging should be at the point of creation. I’m not sure what the original idea is: maintain metadata in MS Office Word, Excel etc and additionally maintain them in SP2010. And how much better will the search result be?
And the answer to Dean’s question is?????
Dean says:
November 3, 2009 at 5:30 am
Does the tag cloud show the tags for items within the site, site collection, web app, farm or multiple farms?
I am unable to show any tags in the tag cloud webpart of SP2010. Please help me with how to display those tags.
Tag & Notes button on my browser page is disabled. how can i enable it?
Is there a way to import an external meta tags tree to moss 2010? I was offered to buy tag cloud solution that support this feature for 2007. Is it worth for me to wait for 2010 (hebrew version supposed to be released by june). I have a big meta tags tree from an existing asp.net that i want to use.
Yoav
We’re using Sharepoint Fondation 2010 (the free edition of Sharepoint), but I don’t see any “Managed Keywords” field when I create pages, nor any Term Store Management.
Is this something only available in other editions of Sharepoint ? I can’t believe something so basic as tagging and categorizing is not available right out of the box…
Wondering if you’ve found a way to add enterprise keywords to a wiki. Wiki categories show up pretty easily, but I’m not finding an intuitive way to add the Enterprise Keywords field to the wiki layout. Anyone?
we have found that the external tags only show up to the users that actually tag them because Sharepoint 2010 by design can’t determine if everyone should be able to see them. Have you found this, do you know of any work arounds? I would think it would have been easy for Microsoft to put in a switch to shut this “feature” off. I see no use for tagging external websites if others cannot see them, it’s more of a bookmark otherwise. Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks,
Jim
Finding the same problem as Jim.
Would be interested to know if I’m doing anything wrong… but as far as I can see – external tags only show up in the tag browser if i’m logged in as the farm account, otherwise they just get trimmed out. This strikes me as a remarkably daft problem to be having in a social platform…
Just wanted to add that the Microsoft 2010 IW Demo (Contoso) does not display this behaviour. Jim, did you upgrade from SP2007?