SharePoint 2010 – Using Social Features for Personal Classification & Improved Findability

Guest Author: Jeff Carr

Social technologies in the enterprise are becoming a key enabler for establishing common connections between employees with similar interests, resulting in increased levels of innovation through knowledge exchange and information transfer. A large part of the functionality offered by SharePoint 2010 revolves around the idea of social collaboration in the enterprise through blogs, wikis, content syndication, discussions and social tagging. 

While the first approach to tagging in SharePoint 2010 originates from controlled vocabularies, the second approach comes to us via uncontrolled terms that are managed as part of a flat list and surfaced in a document’s properties through the Managed Keywords column. The intention is to enable users to apply terminology to content as metadata in a folksonomic way that make sense to them. Rather than a forced selection from a more controlled taxonomic list of values, users are provided the ability to enter their own descriptors. Like Managed Metadata, auto-suggest is offered to provide insight into managed terminology already defined in the taxonomy. Tags applied to content can then be surfaced as navigation through the addition of the Tag Cloud web part.

Users also have the ability to create personal Tags and Notes as well as apply Ratings to content in an effort to categorize, annotate and help with the retrieval of content at a later date in time.

• Tags - Different from the Managed Keywords discussed above, Tags are used to personally organize and bookmark items a user intends to revisit at a later date.  They can be used to tag anything with a URL including both external and internal web pages, list items and documents.
• Notes - These are short annotations that can again be added to anything externally or internally with a URL and used for the purpose of discussion among colleagues in a thread like manner to act as somewhat of a running dialog surrounding a specific item of content.
• Ratings - Provide users with the ability to apply an evaluation on a scale from one to five to web content, list items and documents. Unlike Tags and Notes, Ratings are applied to internal content only and can be used to sort and filter through content contained in lists and libraries. This functionality can also be leveraged in a variety of search solutions to assist users with finding popular content as defined by users in the organization.

Now that we’ve looked at two approaches to tagging content in SharePoint 2010, up next we’ll review how we can leverage taxonomy to improve findability via navigation and browsing. 

Up Next – Using Taxonomy and Metadata to Improve Navigation and Browsing

Guest Author: Jeff Carr

Jeff Carr is an Information Architect and Search Consultant with Earley & Associates specializing in user centered information design. Working with SharePoint since 2003, he has been involved in the design, development and integration of web-based solutions from intranets and extranets to public facing websites for a variety of large enterprises across a wide range of industries.