How to Use SharePoint Metadata to Improve Search and Control Content – Part 1: Introduction to a SharePoint MetaData Model
Guest Author: Mark Klinchin
MetaVis Technologies
One of the main reasons for using a content management system like SharePoint is to efficiently find the right documents and to enforce well-defined processes that govern documents’ behavior during different stages of their life cycle. Both of these activities would greatly benefit from the use of metadata, especially if the metadata model is properly designed and the values are consistently applied to documents.
Metadata typically contains several names/value pairs sometimes called attributes that describe a particular document. For example, an attribute name could be “Keywords” and the values could be specific keywords associated with certain documents like a web page or MS Word file. In more complex examples, metadata may have tens of attributes specifying different aspects of the document origin or use, such as Vendor, Country, Information Category, Source, Retention Policy, Archival Date, etc.
Figure 1 shows metadata for the document gm-lgflag.gif . This document has the following attributes: “Country” with the value Germany; “Information Category” with the value Image; and “Information Source”with the value CIA World Factbook.

Figure 1
Metadata models specify which attributes a certain type of a document may have and which attributes it must have. Metadata models are usually specific to a business case and vary between companies and even projects. As an example, we may define that all our web pages may have ‘Keywords’ as an attribute and all ‘Auto Part Contracts’ must have Vendor, Make, and Model and an optional Address and Phone Number.
Documents find-ability in the enterprise environment involves navigation through lists of folders and documents or filtered document sets; faceted navigation structures; or parametric and full text search results. There are two mechanisms that are the foundation of these techniques: extracting and indexing the usable text from the document (which may not be even possible in some cases i.e. pictures or videos) and using human manageable metadata to describe documents (that could be auto-populated using the text extracted from the document).
Figure 2 shows documents in SharePoint list grouped by Information Category and Country attributes.

Figure 2
Figure 3 shows the same documents as seen in Figure 2 in the same list but grouped by different criteria: Country first and then Information Category. These two views of the same content can be switched with a single mouse-click and provides different navigational experience for the user.

Figure 3
Content control functions include document workflows, security, printing, archival or retention policies, publishing and other mechanisms that enforce proper document capture, authoring, storage, distribution and disposal. To maintain content states and control information, control activities rely on information about the document, which is stored as a part of the metadata. Since control activities tend to vary from organization to organization, so does the metadata associated with them.
SharePoint implements metadata using columns, content types and lists. Efficient taxonomy design that leverages these objects (along with a proper site structure) targeted towards specific business tasks – will lead to a better use of existing content, increased productivity of information workers and a quicker return on your SharePoint investment.
Guest Author: Mark Klinchin
MetaVis Technologies
Mark Klinchin directs the technological vision and product development for MetaVis Technologies. Mark joined the company with 15 years of experience as a software product architect. As CTO of MetaVis he has led the development of MetaVis Architect Suite to take the complexity out of designing, deploying and managing content within Microsoft SharePoint 2003, 2007 and 2010 by offering reusable taxonomies, metadata management and migration software and services. You can follow him on twitter @mklinchin. You can download a trial of MetaVis Architect to see your metadata model at www.metavistech.com.
- How to Use SharePoint Metadata to Improve Search and Control Content - Part 1: Introduction to a SharePoint MetaData Model
- How to Use SharePoint Metadata to Improve Search and Control Content – Part 2: Optimizing SharePoint Architecture to Improve Search and Control Content
- How to Use SharePoint Metadata to Improve Search and Control Content – Part 3: Classifying SharePoint Content to Improve Search and Control Content
I look forward to the second installment.
How does it differ from having a column called “Country” and allowing the user just to type the value? Or have a list for Country and have a list of items as each country and then map it to another list? I am not exactly getting the usage of this feature.
Gopalakrishnan, the Content Type provides the ability to group several columns together. It does not provide much benefit when you only have one column, but as soon as you want 2 or more columns it is very helpful. Content Types also provide the ability to reuse the same Site Column . e.g. the Country column could be used in a Trip Report content type as well as a Project content type
HTH
Dean
Hi Dean,
Thanks for the reply. I did not meant about the usage of Content Type but rather the comparison between having a column in a CT that holds Country information and having a Metadata field that holds the same Country information. Both are searchable, so what’s the big deal?