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

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: Fabian Williams
http://fabiangwilliams.wordpress.com

Synopsis:  Building on my previous post Understanding Managed Metadata in SharePoint 2010: its Impact on Taxonomy, Navigation and Search we discussed how Managed Metadata may be used to build out a Sites Taxonomy and Folksonomy, aid in Navigation and compliment or extend Search. In this post we will discuss the role of the Content Organizer, Routing Rules, and how Managed Metadata may be used in Content Types to dictate where a content final resting place may be.

In order to use Content Organizer it has to be Activated as a “Site Feature”; notice below in the Quick Launch that under ‘Libraries’ there is only one Document Library before the Feature is activated, “Documents”, however once activated in the second image, there is a new Document Library called “Drop Off Library”.  The purpose of this library will be discussed further in this blog, for now lets just go step by step in creating and using it.

Above: Content Organizer is a Site Feature so you have to activate it at a site level. Remember that when you think about scope and routing

Above:  Once Activated you get the link above

In addition to the activate icon practically what you have are new items under the Site Administration menu in Site Settings. Before you activated “Content Organizer” you did not have options for (1) Content Organizer Settings or (2) Content Organizer Rules. In addition you also get a Document Library called “Drop Off Library” which is where all documents go that do not adhere to a defined rule.

Above:  Site Administration with Content Organizer Not Activated

Above:  Site Administration with Content Organizer Activated

In Content Organizer Settings you have a few options as presented below. There are a few options here worth mentioning. Most notably is the option for Folder Partitioning; in previous versions of SharePoint folder use was de-emphasized because of the inability to tie meta-data to folders and the manageability aspects of maintaining and making visible what is inside a folder with little effort.  Folder partitioning solves that by allowing you to create rules around how big a folder gets before you break it into two, or three, or four…

Above: Content Organizer Settings

In this example what I will do is build upon a pervious post where we discussed the use of Managed Metadata Understanding Managed Metadata in SharePoint 2010: its Impact on Taxonomy, Navigation and Search and we will use the Content Organizer to effectively route documents to an appropriate destination.  In this example we will say that we have:

• A Content Type based on our Managed Metadata
• Use the Content Type to build a Content Organizer Rule
• Route documents based on Content Type to the appropriate folder

Above:  This is our Managed Metadata in our Term Store, we will focus on Exchange and SharePoint items/ work products

First we create a new Document Library called Projects and we will have Folders in there that are broken up based on Technology. 

Above: Document Library called Projects is created

Above: Folders for Exchange and SharePoint is created

Next we will create a rule for both Exchange and SharePoint as denoted below; we will also use the Managed Metadata as a means by which to route information see below…

Above:  A Content Organizer Rule that send artifacts to the Exchange Folder based on the Managed Metadata of Exchange 2007 or Exchange 2010 selected.

Above:  A Content Organizer Rule that send artifacts to the SharePoint Folder based on the Managed Metadata of SharePoint 2003 or SharePoint 2007 selected.

Below you see the result of our rules as they are defined and notice I also made one a higher priority over the other.

Above:  Content Organizer Rules are defined

Next I will demonstrate two examples

1. Uploading a document and applying the Managed Metadata as the document is persisted to the library
2. Create a new document and use the DIP to apply the Managed Metadata to the new document

Above: Uploading a document to the Library Root; no folder specified

Above: By clicking on the Tag Icon I can select or Multi-Select the appropriate fields

Above: Fields Selected

Next, we will create a new document from that library based on that Content Type (to which the Managed Metadata played a role), note in the DIP that we can select our options.

Above: New Document created in the Document Library and the DIP is used to apply the relevant tagging

Above: Post Selection and apply a name to the new file

Above: Name applied to the new file and persisted to the SharePoint System

Note here that based on the fact that I selected a Managed Metadata that is flagged in a rule, the Document is persisted however it is saved to an alternate location based on the rules in the Content Organizer.  Again, the WIN here is how you can create a Taxonomy and/or Folksonomy that can not only drive Structure, Navigation, Search, but can also provide intelligence in-terms of location.

Above:  The Final Destination is not where the intent of the end user is, rather, it is based on rules.

An examination of the folder [by clicking on the link or using the quick launch bar] shows that the document is routed by a rule.

Above:  Final resting place for this Status Report is in the Exchange Folder because of the hit on the Managed Metadata during content creation / uploading.

Above:  Using the Managed Metadata Navigation feature in SharePoint you can also navigate, filter, based on the now MILLIONS UPON MILLIONS of rows that can be placed in a list.

Conclusion

The takeaway here is that Content Organizer is huge, and it builds upon other feature sets in SharePoint 2010 to make the overall experience very clean, simple, and results driven.  Come see my session at SPS Ozarks to learn more.

Comments and Critiques are welcomed. Spread the word.

Guest Author: Fabian Williams
http://fabiangwilliams.wordpress.com
Twitter: @FabianWilliams

Fabian Williams is a Technical Lead and SharePoint Architect for CDW Advanced Technology Services SharePoint Practice. He is based out of Herndon Virginia. Mr. Williams has a Bachelors degree in Computer Information Systems from Strayer University, Washington, D.C. and is 9 Credits and a Capstone away from Masters in CIS at Johns Hopkins University in Columbia Maryland. In addition, he is a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (MCSE), Microsoft Certified Solutions Developer (MCSD) and a Microsoft Certified Database Administrator (MCDBA).

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.

Guest Author: Fabian Williams
http://fabiangwilliams.wordpress.com

Acknowledgement:

First I would like to thank Wictor Wilén (MVP / Author / MCT / MCTS / MCP / MSc) out of Sweden who’s article Create SharePoint 2010 Managed Metadata with Excel 2010 was instrumental in speeding up the process of creating my Managed Metadata Term Store for both a live project and this blog.  I would also like to thank Chris O’Brien (MVP) out of the UK, who’s article Managed Metadata in SharePoint 2010 – a key ECM enhancement really puts the value of Managed Metadata in perspective.  The articles mentioned above is the foundation by which I build out a Lab which culminates Wictor and Chris’s work into a Business Case resulting in better Management of Site Columns, Content Types, Content Organizer Routing Rules, Taxonomy/Folksonomy Navigation and enhancements in Search.

Wictor may be found on Twitter here @Wictor and Chris’s Twitter handle is @ChrisO_Brien I follow them, I recommend you do the same if you are a Dev in SharePoint.

The Storyline

So, if you are a regular reader of my blogs, you already know that I try my very best to put some kind of Use/Business case or a story around the technology I am trying to showcase. This time my only difficulty was to take what I am actually doing in SharePoint 2010 Proof of Concept and replicate it in my Lab so it obscures the real work and the identity of the client.  Not too hard right, just a lot of duplication of effort, but you know what they say about practice…

What we have here is a company called “Fabian Williams Enterprises” and it has offices in Jamaica and the United States, as an organization that supports its employees and earn a profit, it has the following departments:

• HR
• Sales
• Marketing
• Design
• Consultants
• PMO

These departments have documents that meet the following criteria:

• May or may not be restricted to the the country of origin (HR Documents, Contracts, etc)
• Project Specific Data (Civilian, Government, Technology Specific)
• etc

As a company trying to be agile in this competitive marketplace, it strives to

1. Leverage Corporate Memory to surface meaningful information for its employees
2. Create a hierarchical structure for the organization and dissemination of information
3. Increase Search responses and improve Search Relevance
4. Allow its employees to Organically Grow the Enterprise Knowledge sharing capabilities of the company through Social and Collaborative means

What we are working with

Our Employees, SharePoint…

Above: AD OU with the Users in the company. Thanks to some of my colleagues who are always my guinea pigs here..

Above: User Profile configured and Imported

Above: The Actors

Step 1 – Configuring the Managed Metadata Service Application

So you maybe wondering why I showed you the items above; yeah, I like the nice pictures and silverlight addin but the real takeaway here is that Out of Box (OOB), The Managed Metadata Service already took information from your Active Directory and build keywords that in the end would reference the individuals above; all this without asking you one thing. Pretty cool huh.. look see…

Above:  Central Administration Managed Metadata Page

Next I will begin the process of Adding myself and the Service Account I am logged in under (SPInstall) as Administrators with the requisite permission to manage this Service Application.  By going to Central Admin, Application Management, Manage Service Application, Managed Metadata Service, clicking not on the word but on the bar next to the phrase, you can click in the ribbon a few options, first, Administrator

Above: The Administrator Dialog

Above: Permissions Dialog

Once you have done that, now you can create a new Group and then Term Stores within.

Above: Clicking on Managed Metadata Service will yield a dropdown where you can create a new Group, I will do that later but for now…

Wictor Wilen created a fantastic Macro that allows you to create a Term Store File or a Term Store Sheet

Above: the Ribbon Macros

In my example I created my organization layout as you would if you were going to a client and discussing Taxonomy.  This is of course not something I would take to production but it give in one glace how you may layer Terms, Inherited Terms, etc, which will be consumed in Site Columns, aid Content Types, and so on and so on.. I made an error here below which I found out only after uploading it. It is not critical it is purely syntax but the result will do this (1) not permit me to use the SharePoint 2010 term and the other (2) is nothing inherits from Region

Above: Wictor Wilens’ Excel work on creating Managed Metadata Term Store get it here… Create SharePoint 2010 Managed Metadata with Excel 2010 once you are finished, by clicking “Create Term Store File” in the ribbon you get the text file (csv) which may be imported directly into the Managed Metadata Service Application.

Above: Resultant CSV File

Above:  Now that we have a text file for our Managed Metadata, we

1. Create a new Group “FabiansWorld”
2. Import Term Set

Above: once you click Import you will navigate to the location of your csv file and Pull it in.

As a result you see below, your hierarchy created in the CSV file is represented below at the levels you determined in the spreadsheet.

Above: the newly imported Term Store and Tags

Below is an important point, that can be the unsung hero in ensuring that a company that:

• is Multinational so its words have cultural differences
• has ever changing terms or terms that are often deprecated
• has its own lexicon which is not the same has industry or your partners

you can create Synonyms for those terms in the example below we have “SharePoint 2007” which also is “MOSS”. You simply just type in the labels and be on your way, this may not be the most efficient way to do this, so I suggest the API as you cant do it with the csv file. well not that I know of. Wictor?

Above: a synonym for the term “SharePoint” pointing to “MOSS”

Next, I wanted to show some of the configurables here, some that are particularly important are

• Submission Policy [default is Closed], but I selected “Open”, this allows for the end users to build on this Taxonomy that is defined in the company; a term called Folksonomy . I strongly advocate this approach but it has to be managed otherwise you can get duplicates, bad terms, inappropriate terms LOL, etc, you know what I mean. As a coder, I would not shy away from this but I would put it under a list and use an event receiver after an approval workflow to persist it to the Taxonomy.

Above: Taxonomy and Folksonomy hand in hand.

Next I will create a few files and and upload them to my Document Center that I created.

Above: Various Files and File Types that can also be Content Types based on your Taxonomy.

Next I will NOT use my Managed Metadata as a Column in my Document Library, I will use OOB “Enterprise Metadata and Keywords Setting” which will allow me to use Tags from that Term Set but does not give me the ability to navigate and get to my terms. This shows that you can just use your Taxonomy and Folksonomy in OOB Library Settings

Above: Document Library in my Document Center with Enterprise Keywords added

Above:  I added a document called “Code of Conduct” and I begin to type ‘Comm…” and all of a sudden I get Write Aheads with my terms pretty cool huh…

However (and I am not naming names here but he is my work colleague LMAO) had a blog where he did not see his Managed Metadata Terms when he went to the Navigations Settings for Metadata. That is by design, you MUST add a Metadata Column to your Library, and based on the level in the hierarchy that you choose you will get that top level and any child level in this pane below.  If you dont do that, you will see what is evident below.

Above: Using “Metadata Navigation Settings” without adding a “Managed Metadata Column” will yield the above.

However if you create a column of type “Managed Metadata” and pick a level within your store…

Above: Column Name “FabianWorldTax_Folks_onomy” of type “Managed Metadata” is added to the library

Above: all the settings I choose. I deliberately choose (1) Required Field (2) Allow Multivalue

After you select “Ok”, now you have a column linked to your Taxonomy/Folksonomy in your Document Library / List

Above: the newly created column.

Now you are able to consume your Taxonomy and Folksonomy (if you permitted this) in the Navigation Settings and Filter Settings.

Above:  Navigation Hierarchies and Filters may be used in this library now based on the Managed Metadata you crated.

The value here is NOT with the one or two document that I have in there now, but when you have Millions upon Millions of documents in this Library which may also be broken up in Partitioning Folders; here is away to filter or trim the noise from the data. Here is the money shot.

Above: Same process as before in the OOB example but this time I can click on the ‘Tag’ Link and get to seem my tree where I can now select meaningful information whereas I may not have known before.

Above: Click Save and you are on your way.

What you will notice below is that there are two documents and the Navigation tree is on the top level.

Above:  Two docs showing at top level of Metadata Navigation

But what happens if I select “International” from the Navigation Tree…

Above:  The result set is peered down [with NO POSTBACK mind you] to the result set I further defined.

How Search is also Impacted

The value here is that in the previous example you “hunted and pecked” to get what you wanted. Here I am going to do a search on

• a Key Term in my Metadata or maybe I know that ‘Communications’ is in the document or tag for what I want.
• I filter on a Taxonomy / Folksonomy term based on my search results to get a more granular result set.

Before I do that however, I need to do a crawl, see below…

Above: Crawling the Local SharePoint Sites

Here I am doing a search on the word ‘Communications’

Above: The result set comes back with two items.  Both were tagged as a HR Communications Document based on my Managed Metadata

Next I do a search on ‘International’, here you go again…

Above: Another search with Hit Highlighting

Finally, I click the Navigation Aid in my Search Result set for International, Imagine if you had 10 pages of results, now you can peer it down as I did.

Above: Filter applied to my Search Result Set.

Conclusion

How can you not love this. So there are two value adds here

1. Navigation is enhanced by the Managed Metadata
2. Search is Refined by the Managed Metadata

Hope this was helpful, critique & comments welcomed…

Part 2 of 2 will focus on Managed Metadata and how it can be used to enrich “Content Organization” in SharePoint 2010

Guest Author: Fabian Williams
http://fabiangwilliams.wordpress.com
Twitter: @FabianWilliams

Fabian Williams is a Technical Lead and SharePoint Architect for CDW Advanced Technology Services SharePoint Practice. He is based out of Herndon Virginia. Mr. Williams has a Bachelors degree in Computer Information Systems from Strayer University, Washington, D.C. and is 9 Credits and a Capstone away from Masters in CIS at Johns Hopkins University in Columbia Maryland. In addition, he is a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (MCSE), Microsoft Certified Solutions Developer (MCSD) and a Microsoft Certified Database Administrator (MCDBA).

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.

There are so many new features and enhancements in SharePoint 2010 that it’s hard to keep track of all of the great things going on. One of the interesting new enhancements is the Content Organizer. It started out its life in SharePoint 2007 as the records routing available only to records centers. However, In SharePoint 2010 it’s been set free for use in any type of site. There are a few unique ways that it can be used – and a few quirks you should be aware of if you want to leverage it in your environment.

The Content Organizer feature is a site feature. Once activated a new library – called the Drop Off Library – is created and two new links are added to the Site Settings menu – Content Organizer Settings and Content Organizer Rules. The settings allows you to restrict uploading to libraries that content organizer has rules for, controls whether content organizer rules can target other sites, controls additional folders being created once a specified number of items have been added to a folder, as well as some other settings. The content organizer rules is more interesting because it allows you to establish a set of rules as to where the content should go.

To start with you need to know that Content Organizer works with content types. That means you’ll need to create content types for the types of content that you want to route. Technically, you could use document but that’s not going to be very interesting. Once you have selected a rule in a new content organizer rule you can specify additional conditions. For instance, if you wanted to place expense reports that were for more than $10,000 in a different location (to drive a different workflow) you could specify that the total value is greater than $10,000 for the rule. The final part is to specify the target location and potentially the additional sub-folder based on the attributes. This is the powerful part, you can automatically route documents into folders based on the metadata in the item.

This feature can be leveraged to automatically route forms to the correct location based on content type – and a field in the content type. When you develop your forms in Microsoft Office client applications you can have fields from the document automatically populate columns of metadata in SharePoint – therefore providing the content organizer something to route on. You can learn more about how to create Office client templates that promote fields in my whitepaper written for SharePoint 2007 Managing Enterprise Metadata with Content Types. This shows you how to do this for Word documents. You can do similar things by promoting fields InfoPath forms. By doing this the user simply fills out the form and submits it. SharePoint does the work to move it into the right document library and folder.

One of the interesting side effects to this approach is that the documents aren’t moved immediately from the drop off library to their respective target. Somewhere along the way the process for providing the required metadata is skipped and as a result instead of an event receiver kicking off and moving the document, the system waits for a timer job to run which looks for items in the drop off libraries of the various sites that have been created and processes any of the items in the drop box – if possible. You can change the schedule – or force running of the Content Organizer Processing by going into Central Administration, selecting Monitoring, and Content Organizer processing. The default schedule of once a day may not be enough if you plan on heavily leveraging this feature.

You can also trigger processing of individual documents, if you were to go in and save the properties of the document, so it’s possible to get the content organizer to route an individual document immediately.

If you want to create a simple test case, that’s easy enough to do:

1. Create a new content type built upon the document content type.
2. Name the content type something like Office Document
3. Add the ‘Author’ site column to the content type.
4. Activate the Content Organizer feature
5. Create a target library called ‘Documents’
6. Add the Office Document content type you created to target library and to the DropOff library created by the content organizer.
7. Remove the document content type from the DropOff library so uploaded documents default to the Office Document type you created.
8. Create a content organizer rule (Site Actions-Site Settings-Content Organizer Rules) that routes Office Documents to the Documents library and creates folders by Author with the format of just %2.

Now when you upload word documents to the DropOff library, the author field will be automatically populated for you from what was in the document. The content organizer will see the content and route it to the ‘Documents’ library and create a sub-folder for the author’s name based on the rule you created.

Of course, you can create more complicated scenarios where you’re using Quick Parts to capture data in your Word document and routing based on that information, but this is a quick way to leverage the content organizer.

Guest Author: Robert Bogue

Robert Bogue, MS MVP Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, MCSE, MCSA:Security, etc., has contributed to more than 100 book projects and numerous other publishing projects.  Robert’s latest book is The SharePoint Shepherd’s Guide for End Users.  You can find out more about the book at http://www.SharePointShepherd.com.  Robert blogs at http://www.thorprojects.com/blog You can reach Robert at [email protected].

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.

This is the second in a series of short presentations exploring what’s new and improved in SharePoint 2010. You can find previous (and future presentations) in the SharePoint 2010 Handbook online at http://www.sharepointsharon.com/resources/handbook-2010/