Fabian Williams has done a fabulous job explaining how to work with managed metadata in SharePoint 2010. Like Fabian, I too was intrigued with Wictor Wilén’s Excel script for generating the required CSV more easily. But then my mind started to turn over:  I love building my metadata taxonomies in MindManger. I wondered if I could somehow create a taxonomy map that would allow a user to really see and work with their taxonomy, but that would then generate the required CSV file?

I have not really programmed seriously for over ten years. They say it’s like riding a bike? Well I have some seriously skinned knees to show for my efforts. I’d be happy to see the results of code clean-up and simplification after a professional programmer gets her hands on it. At this point, for me, just working is good enough.

So, here is my taxonomy map:

You can see that I have three top level terms, each of which has a black flag. The black flag marks a term that is used in the hierarchy, but that cannot be selected by the user. You can see that “Locations”, “North America” and “Europe” are flagged this way. This will allow users to easily navigate to the correct city, but will not allow them to select a continent.

Each term can also have a description. Here, I used the MindManager “Note” field to hold these descriptions:

Now, all you need to do to create the CSV is right click in the top-level topic and select “Export to SP2010 csv file”:

The csv file is created and you get a dialog box telling you that the process is done:

If you open the CSV file (open it with Notepad, not Excel), you will see the properly formatted CSV ready for importing into your taxonomy.

I am a very visual guy, and a major MindManager fan. I’m really happy that I can now get this great tool to generate my CSV files for my term stores.

Installation instructions:

Grab the macro file ExportMetadataV2.mmbas

Go to the Tools menu, and using the Macros button, select “Organize Macros”

In the dialog, click “Add” and type in the name of the macro and browse to the ExportMetadataV2.mmbas file:

Set the “Menu” drop-down to “Topic Context Menu” and click “OK” and then close.

You will now have a functioning macro that you execute by right clicking on the top level item’s menu.

Here’s the code and the sample mind map

Author: Ruven Gotz

Ruven Gotz is a senior consultant with Ideaca, a Microsoft Gold Partner based in Toronto. For the past five years he has been focused on delivering award-winning SharePoint solutions (most recently, a Microsoft Impact Award for Information Worker Solution of the Year, 2008). Ruven’s blog is at http://spinsiders.com/ruveng and you can follow him at http://twitter.com/ruveng.