Guest Author: Jeff Carr

Our enterprise systems themselves are only able to take us so far, and it’s crucial to be cognizant of the fact that there’s still a lot of outside work that needs to be done. The underlying foundation required to leverage our technological capability is derived from the establishment of strong publishing models, standard workflow processes, corporate governance, continuous taxonomy management and well trained users that have been included as key stakeholders throughout the design process. 

The many great features and functionality offered as part of the SharePoint 2010 platform are sure to provide the foundation for better management of information in the organization. Even with the introduction of the Term Store Management Tool and many of the other areas discussed in this series, it’s important to return to the beginning and remind ourselves that SharePoint itself, at least at this point in time, is not intended nor should it be perceived as an enterprise-wide taxonomy management tool. SharePoint 2010 still lacks functionality in a number of key areas, such as the ability to perform auto-categorization and the management of complex relationships between terms. 

SharePoint is one of many enterprise solutions we employ, and to make it effective we must ensure that we take the steps necessary to fully understand our domains of knowledge. Doing so provides us with the ability to design appropriate solutions that best describe in detail the world in which we operate. To fully leverage our technical capability, we must strive to implement solid processes around information architecture and ensure we understand conceptually how they need to be represented within our technological environments.

The development of enterprise taxonomy, as a concept in and of itself, is a technologically agnostic exercise. Its application to technology as an enrichment activity is where the rubber meets the road and the benefits are realized. Without a solid foundation, chaos in terms of findability and a good user experience are inevitable. With it, we stand an increased chance at success.

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.

Guest Author: Jeff Carr

Taxonomy managed in another tool outside of the SharePoint environment may be imported into SharePoint 2010. Although Terms and Term Sets can be created manually using the functionality provided by the Term Store Management Tool, a significantly simpler approach to taxonomy creation is through importation. 

Term Sets can be imported into existing Groups by Taxonomy Managers using the Managed Metadata Import File, which is a comma delimited document in standard UTF-8 CSV file format. The basic file contains the six types of metadata fields defined below. 

• Term Set Name – Unique name given to the vocabulary.
• Term Set Description – Short description of the Term Set and its purpose.
• LCID - Local Identifier that corresponds to the language of the term.
• Available for Tagging – Identifies whether to make the term available for use in tagging, and is represented by a value of either TRUE or FALSE. If left blank it is defaulted to TRUE.
• Term Description – A description of the Term displayed as part of a tooltip surfaced with the auto-suggest functionality during user tagging. 
• Term Hierarchy – Identification of the individual Terms that comprise the Term Set. Terms entered at Level 1 represent a flat list, whereas Terms added to subsequent Levels represent hierarchies. Term Hierarchy is restricted to seven levels.
  
  

Additional properties available for importation as part of a Term Set through the API include:

• Owner - The name of the primary user or group responsible for the Term Set.
  
  
• Contact - E-mail address of the user that receives feedback and/or term suggestions from users while applying tags to content.
  
  
• Stakeholders -The names of individuals or groups that are to be notified prior to any major changes to the Term Set.
  
  
• Submission Policy – Establishes whether or not users have the ability to add new Terms directly from the tagging interface. 
  

Although much has been improved in terms of features and functionality in this latest release, to be fully successful we must always be conscious of the fact that there’s still a lot of outside work that needs to be done. The final post in the series on taxonomy and information architecture in SharePoint 2010 pulls it all together. 

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.

Guest Author: Jeff Carr

Now that we’ve developed a fairly solid understanding of the importance of taxonomy as it relates to information management and the user experience, let’s take a look at how it’s administered. Taxonomy management in SharePoint 2010 sees a significant improvement over functionality offered by the product’s predecessors.

First and foremost is the creation of a term store repository, enabling centralized vocabulary management applicable across site collections. Management of taxonomy takes place within the Term Store Management Tool, which is accessible through either Central Administration or Site Administration. Basic functionality provided for the management of taxonomy includes:

• Groups - Represent defined security boundaries in terms of taxonomy governance. Multiple groups may be created within a Managed Metadata Service, with each Group having multiple Terms Sets. Management (create, edit, delete) of Group properties takes place here.
  
  
• Term Sets - One or more Term Sets (up to 1,000) are defined as part of a Group. Term Sets can be created manually or imported through the interface. Management (create, edit, delete) of Term Set properties, including Term hierarchy, takes place here. 
  
  
• Terms - Individual words or phrases are added to a Term Set with management (create, copy, reuse, merge, deprecate, move or delete) taking place here. A maximum of 30,000 Terms can be added to a single Term Set. 
  
  

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.

Guest Author: Jeff Carr

With hundreds or thousands of employees generating information on a daily basis, there’s bound to be a buildup of ROT (content that is “Redundant, Outdated or Trivial”). When left unattended, this content can quickly evolve into a negative user experience, particularly in search as users are forced to sift through pages of irrelevant results. Automating processes that address the review, archival and/or disposition of information in the organization on a regularly scheduled basis can ensure both the relevance and timeliness of information.

The implementation of retention schedules in SharePoint 2010 can be associated with specific types of content through the application of information management policies. Retention Stages are defined within the settings for a content type. 

Selecting the option to add a new Retention Stage offers the ability to establish events, actions and recurrences for the chosen content type. 

• Event – Definition of the event that needs to take place in order for the Retention Stage to be carried out. Typically based on the passing of a defined time period since document creation or modification.
  
• Action - Definition of the action required to take place once the event has been triggered. Some types of content may require immediate archival or just a standard review, while others are to be permanently deleted. More often than not, an associated workflow will be kicked off to notify an individual or group responsible for the item.
  
• Recurrence - Definition of how often the Retention Stage is required to be repeated. Typically based on the passing of a defined time period since the activation of the last Retention Stage.
  

SharePoint 2010 makes the automation of retention schedules a fairly straightforward activity. The majority of the work behind the definition of retention is sure to take place outside of the technological environment, as part of the organizational information management, records management or legal compliance strategy.

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.

Guest Author: Jeff Carr

Working through the process of developing an enterprise information management strategy uncovers elements common across the organization. These commonalities should result in the establishment of a set of core content types, each with a standard set of metadata attributes. A fundamental challenge faced by organizations with respect to specifying content types and metadata in earlier versions of SharePoint has been the inability to easily repurpose or reuse them across site collections.

Because site collections have represented fairly strict boundaries, most organizations have been forced to design and build custom solutions to get around this problem. Synchronization of content types and metadata across site collections required them to be copied or updated to each site collection, either manually by an administrator or programmatically through workarounds to the system itself. 

Fortunately, SharePoint 2010 has addressed this issue through the implementation of Content Type Hubs. With the Content Type Hub, a specific site collection is selected to act as the central repository for content types intended for use enterprise-wide. Content types that are made part of the hub can then be syndicated, or published out, for consumption across other site collections.

What this means is that modifications to a global content type can now easily be pushed out to all site collections where it is being used, simplifying management. Next up we take a look at information lifecycle management through the application of retention stages.

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.

Guest Author: Jeff Carr

Search is typically thought of as a black box, with functionality that is commonly misunderstood by most users. People often turn to search as a result of a breakdown in information architecture, and tend to have high expectations based on experience gained outside the organization through the use of technologies such as Google. Unfortunately, inside the firewall, search quite often develops into more of a random document generator than a useful tool, as heaps of unstructured content are crawled and added to the index. The catch here is that the development and application of good taxonomy to content is a prerequisite, foundational element of good enterprise search. 

A key new search feature offered in SharePoint 2010 is what’s known as the Refinement Panel, which is a web part displayed on the search results page along the left hand side of the interface. The purpose is to offer searchers the ability to easily refine a result set based on metadata properties. Out-of-the-box refinements include refinement by metadata attributes such as File Type, Site, Author and Modified Date, along with Managed Metadata that has been tagged to content returned in the results. Managed Keywords are offered in an alphabetical listing as an additional refinement option, appearing at the bottom in a section labeled Tags, and further configurations of custom metadata fields may be added based on managed properties.

The familiarity of the refinement function will certainly be of added value to searchers, as it is akin to faceted search and query refinement through the presentation of metadata attributes. To accomplish this in SharePoint 2007 more often than not required the use of Codeplex’s MOSS Faceted Search web part, but unlike the Codeplex solution, the Refinement Panel does not display the total number of documents per facet or provide the ability to drill into the taxonomy hierarchically.  

Unlike a true faceted search interface that displays refinements separately, incremental query refinement in SharePoint 2010 is identified by a subtle visual change in the user interface. Selected metadata values remain in their original location, and are only visually integrated with the result set through an outline and opening on the right hand side, as illustrated here. 

The immediate ability to remove a selection is hidden from the user, and is only revealed to the user when the cursor hovers over the selected value, marked by the appearance of an X. Users are un-intuitively forced to reselect the same value to remove it from the refinements.

Regardless of some of the limitations outlined, this functionality will improve the basic search experience enough for most organizations, without resorting to heavy customization. In our next post we’ll take a look at overcoming one of the biggest obstacles in previous versions of SharePoint, sharing content types across site collections.

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.

Guest Author: Jeff Carr

Metadata represents the foundation for a large range of functionality across sites in SharePoint. The goal of metadata lies not in the tagging of content itself, but rather in the potential it offers for the improvement of findability via navigation. 

A new feature offered in SharePoint 2010 is Metadata Navigation, which provides users with navigational elements constructed from tags that have been applied by publishers to content. The purpose is to filter or refine the result set based on taxonomy that has been bound to Managed Metadata columns. 

Two forms of functionality are provided:

1. Navigation Hierarchies – These provide an expandable and collapsible hierarchy based on taxonomic values bound to a specific chosen field. You can expand a term set and select terms to filter the current view of the library. 

Applying a filter by selecting a term displays only those documents that have been tagged with that term. If a selected term has associated children, by default they are included as part of the filter.




A further selection on the filter icon located beside the original term offers the option to apply the filter on the parent term only.




Filters are also offered as part of the header fields displayed in a view of a document library. Managed Metadata fields that are bound to a hierarchical term set may be browsed, with selected terms applied as filters. The user interface is slightly different than that provided by the Navigation Hierarchies, but the functionality is equivalent (including the caveat).




Caveat: Although presented as a form of guided navigation, this approach lacks true faceted functionality for the user experience. Proper faceted navigation displays a listing of only those term sets and terms that have been applied to content stored within the document library itself. Presenting the user with the entire taxonomic hierarchy means that the potential exists for navigation down a multitude of paths that have a high probability of displaying no documents.

2. Key Filters – These provide the ability to filter the current view of a document library based on taxonomic values bound to a specific field. The difference between Key Filters and Navigation Hierarchies is that with Key Filters, users enter keywords into a text field and managed terms from the taxonomy are returned through auto-suggest functionality. Alternatively, selecting the tags icon   displays a popup window containing a browsable list of terms from which to select. 
 

Now that we’ve seen how we can leverage our taxonomies and metadata to enhance the navigational experience, next up we’ll look at using them to improve the search experience.

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.

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.

Guest Author: Jeff Carr

The semantic enrichment of content through the application of metadata tagging is a critical activity in the creation of a well managed and usable information environment. There are a number of reasons why tagging is so important to enterprise information, including the enhancement of navigation (filtering/sorting mechanisms, guided navigation), improvement of search (relevancy, faceted search and best bets) and personalization (suggestions for related content, job role, location or department).

Tagging in SharePoint 2010 is approached from two perspectives, with the first originating from controlled vocabularies via Metadata Terms. Controlled terms are managed in a Term Set and surfaced as part of a document’s properties using the Managed Metadata column. The field itself is directly bound to a Term Set (or subset thereof), and enables users to easily browse available Terms for tagging. Important functionality appearing as part of the user interface includes:

• Auto-Suggest – As characters are entered into the Managed Metadata field, type-ahead functionality offers Term suggestions along with Term Hierarchies to the user. Suggestions originate from the taxonomy and are presented in a flat list.
  
• Hover Tooltip – Defined Term attributes are displayed to the user when the mouse hovers over one of the suggested items.
  

  Attributes displayed include:

  • Preferred Term – Identified as the Default Label, this is the preferred word or phrase that should be used for tagging (“Contract Management”).
    
    
  • Term Hierarchy – For Managed Terms, the word or phrase location within the hierarchy is also displayed as part of the Term presentation to provide additional insight for the user. Term properties, listed beneath the Member Of label, display all locations where the Term is in use. (“Topic: Administration”).
    
    
  • Description - A statement intended as a message to taggers that provides instructional text on how the Term should be used. (“Use this tag to identify official documents that are binding legal agreements enforceable in a court of law.”).
    
    
  • Synonyms - Identification of words, phrases or abbreviations with meaning the same or similar to the preferred term (“Contractual Agreement; Vendor Licensure”). Synonyms are displayed in the hover tooltip, but cannot be selected themselves for tagging. 
    
    

To the far right of the form field is a tags icon   that when selected, displays a popup window containing a hierarchically browsable list of terms that includes the functionality and attributes described above. Depending on the Term Set properties, users can then apply one or more Terms and metadata to an item.

 

Additionally, physical locations that exist within a hierarchy can be configured to automatically apply metadata to content, thus simplifying the user experience by helping to reduce the total number of selections required to be applied by publishers. An example might be to automatically tag all documents produced by a business unit with the name of that business unit. 

Users also have the ability to offer feedback to Taxonomy Managers on the terminology defined as part of a Term Set. To enable this functionality, the Contact section of the Term Set must be filled out with the e-mail address of the Term Set Manager.

The feedback function is displayed to end users after selection of the tags icon  brings up the full hierarchy in the popup window. At the top of the interface is a section that allows the user to make contact via email during the tagging process. Clicking on the Send Feedback link opens a new message in the user’s default email program, with the To field addressed to the email address defined and the Subject field containing the text “User Feedback for [Term Set Name] Term Set”. 

Coming up next we’ll take a look at the second approach to tagging content in SharePoint 2010 – Using Social Features for Personal Classification & Improved Findability 

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.

Guest Author: Jeff Carr

As a follow up to last week’s guest post on AIIM’s Digital Landfill blog and the official launch of SharePoint 2010 only weeks away (May 12 at 11 a.m. EST), I thought I’d take some time and put together a series of posts that dig into further detail around each of the 8 things you need to know about taxonomy, metadata and information architecture in SharePoint 2010. Topics in the will series include: 

• Using Taxonomy and Controlled Vocabularies for Content Enrichment 
• Using Social Features for Personal Classification and Improved Findability 
• Using Taxonomy and Metadata to Improve Navigation and Browsing 
• Using Taxonomy and Metadata to Improve Search and Discovery 
• Sharing Content Types Across Site Collections 
• Using Retention Stages to Manage the Information Lifecycle 
• Administering Taxonomy Using Term Store Management 
• Importing Taxonomy Using the Managed Metadata Import File

Before jumping in however, I’d like to take a step back and look at the problem of taxonomy and information architecture in general from a more strategic perspective. As the growth of digital content within our organizations continues to increase at almost unmanageable rates, our ability to provide intuitive access to the right information at the right time for users is rapidly becoming a significant challenge. If left unchecked, this challenge is sure to translate into significant costs as a result of lost productivity through time spent looking for relevant information.

Oftentimes, our IT departments attempt to solve the problem through the procurement of new technologies that come with the promise of improving findability only to find that the more technology we throw at the problem, the more complex it becomes and the further behind we fall. 

Successful information management requires strategic initiatives that lie outside the realm of enterprise systems and focus on understanding and developing a consistent set of organizing principles to be applied across all technologies. Understanding the intricacies of knowledge domains enables enterprises to fully leverage technical capability and when this is not done, chances are new systems and tools will not fully meet the needs of the business.

SharePoint is a technology that is no different. Organizations use SharePoint for a variety of purposes from intranets, extranets and customer portals to document management and team collaboration. There’s been significant excitement about new product functionality introduced as part of the SharePoint 2010 platform for taxonomy implementation and management across sites and site collections. SharePoint 2007 and its predecessors have had their challenges with the implementation and management of taxonomy, including: 

• A lack of cross site collection synchronization of content types, metadata and vocabularies; 
• An inability to create and manage taxonomic relationships between terms; 
• No concept of hierarchical metadata, resulting in programmatic customizations for tagging; and 
• An inability to easily surface and leverage metadata through search and navigation.

Although SharePoint 2010 has taken a number of strides in the right direction to solving some of these problems, our estimation is that many of the same challenges in information management will persist moving forward, primarily because SharePoint itself is not intended to be an enterprise taxonomy management tool. 

To get to a point where information assets are fully exploited and working to meet the needs of the organization, time and effort must be spent building an appropriate foundation for the information ecosystem – through design, development and application of foundational information architectures and enterprise taxonomy. A well planned and intelligently constructed foundation is the basis for successful information applications and high quality user experiences. 

Fundamental Principles of Enterprise Taxonomy

How taxonomy is applied to a body of knowledge is dependent on the technologies used within a domain. Different systems leverage taxonomy in different ways, and taxonomy management in the typical information environment is fragmented and inconsistent with each application using a separate instance of an oftentimes similar vocabulary.

True enterprise taxonomy is intended to be centrally managed and pushed out for consumption by our enterprise systems. SharePoint is but one of many systems required to consume taxonomy in an effort to provide a better user experience, and is rarely the only such system in use within an organization. Even though it is often the centralized access point to enterprise information, the need to establish common vocabularies across systems (or at the very least, mappings of similar vocabularies) is still an important organizational requirement.

Only after we have designed and constructed a solid foundation with respect to the organizing principles of our information can we consider how it is to be managed, implemented and consumed by the technologies we employ. As we work our way through this series please keep these fundamental principles of taxonomy in mind as they are a key element in strategic information management. 

Understanding Core Taxonomic Concepts in SharePoint 2010  

There’s been significant excitement about new product functionality introduced as part of the SharePoint 2010 platform for taxonomy implementation and management across sites and site collections. With it has come a whole new set of terminology that needs to be defined prior to proceeding with our discussion. Core concepts basic to our understanding are (via MSDN Library): 

• Managed Metadata - A hierarchical collection of predefined centrally managed terms that are applied by publishers as metadata attributes for content items. 
• Term Store - A database that is used to house both Managed Terms and Managed Keywords. 
• Managed Term - A predefined word or phrase created and managed by a user with appropriate permissions and often organized into a hierarchy (controlled vocabularies, taxonomic in nature). 
• Managed Keyword - A non-hierarchical word or phrase that has been added to the keyword set directly by a system user (uncontrolled vocabularies, folksonomic in nature). 
• Group - From a taxonomy perspective, a group is a flat list or hierarchical collection of related attributes comprised of one or more Term Sets. 
• Term Set - A flat list or hierarchical collection of related Terms that belong to a Group. 
• Term - A word or phrase that can be applied by publishers and system users as metadata to content. 

Armed with an understanding of this new terminology we can now move on to the enrichment of content through the application of taxonomy in SharePoint 2010. 

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.