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.

On a swing through Oregon in March, Joel Oleson and I presented to the Portland SharePoint User’s Group on topics surrounding social computing, metadata and taxonomy within SharePoint, and someone asked a great question: why can’t you just purchase a pre-defined taxonomy?

One of the most important aspects of a successful SharePoint deployment is a well-defined taxonomy and metadata library. Taking the time to define your metadata and content types, build out your taxonomy, and set in place a governance model will ensure that your users will be able to find their content (granted they are assigning the metadata!). But defining, building, and governing your system takes a lot of effort – both at startup and as an ongoing activity. So why can’t someone just purchase a canned taxonomy and vast lists of keywords from a consultant to jumpstart their work?

While I’m sure there are consultants who offer this kind of service, providing guidance and expertise on process and best practices, is that really the right thing to do? (I’m not knocking these consultants by any means, just talking about what is right for your business) They cannot offer more than generic taxonomies based on broad industry knowledge, or around competitive product and service verticals. How useful is this information, really? How much time will you spend trying to match this generic taxonomy to the nuances of your business, instead of outlining your own business taxonomy and expanding on what is unique about you?

I go through these questions as part of my presentation on the topic at user groups and SharePoint Saturdays (most recently at #SPSDC). The hard work must be done by those who know your business – you and your team. Of course, there will be plenty of consultants who will be happy to charge you to embed themselves, offering to learn everything about your business and then build out your system. You might get to deployment more quickly this way if you don’t already have the SharePoint expertise within your organization. But what happens when the consultant leaves post-deployment? Where is the expertise to maintain and update what was built to keep your system relevant?

I came across a great quote in the Harvard Business Review by Dan Ariely in ‘Why Businesses Don’t Experiment’ (April 2010, Page 34):

“Companies (and people) are notoriously bad at making trade-offs. There’s the false sense of security that heeding experts provides. When we pay consultants, we get an answer from them and not a list of experiments to conduct. We tend to value answers over questions because answers allow us to take action, while questions mean that we need to keep thinking.”

The net-net: you need to do the hard work of planning out your taxonomy. Get help, sure, but don’t think you can hand it off to someone else. But if you do decide to farm it out, ping me and I’ll send you my consulting rates

Guest Author: Christian Buckley
http://buckleyplanet.net

Christian is a senior product manager at echoTechnology, where he responsible for content, strategy, and evangelism. Prior to echo, Christian was part of the Microsoft Managed Services (MMS) SharePoint team, now known as BPOS-D (Business Productivity Online Services-Dedicated). He has also led product and deployment teams in the creation of product lifecycle management and supply chain-integration solutions for some of the world’s largest manufacturing and telecom companies, and co-authored 3 books on software configuration management and defect tracking. You can find him at http://buckleyplanet.net or on Twitter at @buckleyplanet

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.

Guest Author: Andrew Woodward, SharePoint MVP

Having been an advocate of SharePoint and Agile development for some time I have always found it disappointing that there has not been a decent solution for managing my Agile Projects in SharePoint.  I initially floated the idea of a scrum tool for SharePoint just under a year ago and have at last managed to dedicate some time in order to make this idea a reality – internally this is called Project Aberdovey. 

Today we announce two things

• Project Aberdovey will be called “21Scrum – Scrum for SharePoint“
• The beta release is available for download today

21Scrum

21Scrum is a Sandboxed solution that works with all editions of SharePoint 2010 including SharePoint Foundation. 

The solution is made of up 3 key areas

• Sprint Planning
• Burndown Chart
• Story Board

Sprint Planning

All of your backlog items are maintained in a SharePoint list,  you are free to extend the list to add additional metadata and views to make management of the backlog easier.   Planning your sprints is done using the Sprint Planning board where you plan as you would with a white board moving stories between the backlog, current and next sprints.

Sprint Planning

Visibility is central to Scrum projects and the Burndown chart provided gives you a real time view of how you sprint is progressing against the ideal.

Story Board

The story board is what the team uses during the Sprint, ideally this is a big white board in the team room – with distributed teams this is not viable.  The 21Scrum story board provides this white board view and, like the Sprint Planning, allows the team to drag and drop stories as they progress through the stages from Not Started to Done.

Getting Started

A quick guide to getting started with 21Scrum

1) Download the 21Scrum Sandboxed solution – rename the file from .zip to .wsp

2) Navigate to the Solution Gallery in the Site Collection you want to deploy 21Scrum and click upload solution (in the solutions Tab)

3) Upload the 21Scrum solution and activate it

4) Activate the Features

21Scrum is divided into two part

• Site Collection Feature which has things like the WebPart definitions
• Site Feature which enables the lists to support the team

This split allows you to have multiple independent Scrum teams working in the same site collection.

At the root site collection activate the Site Collection Feature

And activate the Site level feature in the site that you want to manage your Scrum team

5) The Burndown Chart is provided as a web part,  add this web part to a page.

As you haven’t started doing any work yet your Burndown chart will look like this.   To make testing of the beta easier we have provided another web part.  The “Populate Demo Data” web part will create sample data as if you were half way through a sprint. Simply add this web part to a page and click “Populate Demo Data” and have a play with the Sprint Planning, Story Board and Burndown.

Giving Feedback

Having used a lot of scrum tools and often found them trying to do too many things we have kept 21Scrum very focused,  the ability to be able to get up and running quickly and for the tool to add value and not become an overhead was crucial.   However we may have missed something that you can’t live without!

The beta release of 21Scrum is available to anyone to download and use,  it is not restricted in time-boxed so please feel free to use this on real life projects.

All we ask is that you provide feedback so we can make sure that when we release 21Scrum it is the best Scrum tool available.

If you have a feature request or find a bug please add comments on this page to send an email to [email protected]

Guest Author: Andrew Woodward, SharePoint MVP

Andrew Woodward, SharePoint MVP, is founder and Principal Consultant at 21apps as small company focused on providing expert consultancy around the expanding SharePoint platform.  Andrew has a passion for agile development and is challenging the SharePoint community to adopt better development practices.
Blog: http://www.21apps.com/blog
Twitter: @AndrewWoody

I finally got around to reading the preliminary info on MSDN in regards to how SharePoint 2010 will be treating taxonomy and metadata. As most of you know, MOSS 2007 had some serious challenges in this regard that caused IAs like me much consternation when trying to implement effective content structures (e.g. no hierarchical metadata, no sharing controlled vocabularies across site collections, etc.).

It would appear that SharePoint 2010 includes many new features under the umbrella of Enterprise Metadata Management to solve some of these issues. Here are the highlights…

1. Terms & Keywords

SharePoint 2010 has a few types of vocabularies with different levels of control:

Terms: Basic construct – a word or phrase that can be associated with content. A term can become a managed term or a managed keyword.

Managed Terms = A controlled term that can only be created by those with appropriate permissions. Term sets (can also be considered taxonomy facets) are collections of related terms that can be hierarchically structured.

Managed Keywords = User-generated keywords (aka tags) kept in a non-hierarchical list called the keyword set.

What’s nice is that you can easily turn a managed keyword into a managed term, which essentially sets up SharePoint 2010 as a decent platform to blend taxonomy and folksonomy approaches (more on this later).

2. Managed metadata & the Term Store

Once you have managed terms in place, you can create a new column type called “managed metadata”. This column type is like the 2007 lookup, but points to the managed term sets instead of lists. 

One of the biggest limitations of MOSS 2007 was the site collection boundary: lists were specific to a site collection, so in order to share metadata and taxonomy across multiple collections, you had to essentially reproduce the same lists in each collection.

Managed term sets (and managed keywords) now live in what’s called the Term Store Management Tool – a centralized database that allows term sets to be shared across a farm.

Term Store Management Tooi

Centralized metadata repository in SharePoint 2010
Image courtesy of http://www.endusersharepoint.com/2009/11/02/managing-metadata-in-sharepoint-2010/

3. Taxonomy & Metadata Management

Within the Term Store, there are some metadata and taxonomy management functions enabled, though the documentation is not clear on how many of them are achieved.

My biggest concern is the whole question of integrity and change propagation, but overall this is a huge leap forward from 2007 where there was no taxonomy management to speak of. This is actually more functionality than I’ve seen in many very expensive CM suites, so right now on the surface, I’m rather pleased with this set of features.

4. Tagging

I haven’t seen a screenshot of the interface for tagging from a hierarchical term set, so I’m still a bit in the dark on whether it’s a tree view or a panel pick list. But, Microsoft does point out that there is also type-ahead functionality for managed metadata fields, meaning that you can start typing and it will present suggestions from the managed term set, as well as show you the term’s position in the hierarchy (contextual placement). This is a massive improvement over the previous tagging, which was limited to flat pick lists – cascading lists were even a customization.

Type-ahead is also available for managed keywords, which is excellent in that it will suggest previously entered keywords as suggestions – encouraging cross-user consistency in tagging is always a boon. You can ignore the suggestions however and add a new keyword at any time.

Tagging interface for managed keywords

Image courtesy of http://www.endusersharepoint.com/2009/11/02/managing-metadata-in-sharepoint-2010/

Conclusions

Still a lot of details to discover about how a lot of these metadata and taxonomy functions behave IRL, but for now I’m secure in my assessment that Microsoft has taken a sizeable leap forward in fixing some of the ills of MOSS 2007 giving us taxonomy and metadata nerds many of the tools we need to create effective content structures in SharePoint 2010. Looking forward to seeing more as the beta program kicks off. If any of you have direct experience and more information to share, please do so in the comments!

I’ll post separately about my take on these functions and how they encourage hybrid approaches to taxonomy and folksonomy.

You can also read more about SharePoint 2010 in this CMS Watch report by my colleague, Shawn Shell.

This article was originally posted on the Earley & Associates blog.

Guest Author: Stephanie Lemieux

Stephanie has a Masters in Library and Information Studies (MLIS) from McGill University, specializing in knowledge and content management, taxonomy, and information architecture. For the past several years, she has been working on taxonomy & knowledge management contracts and research projects for a variety of clients.

Editor’s Note: In a new series of articles, I will be introducing you to some of the speakers who will be presenting at the SharePoint Evolutions Conference in London next week, pointing you to articles on their sites, offering downloads of white papers, and publishing articles on their subjects of expertise. — Mark Miller

Guest Author: Ari Bakker

Findability is one of the most important factors in the success of a SharePoint site. If users cannot find what they are looking they will quickly use alternate methods to get results. Employees that cannot find information are less productive and less likely to use the system in general. Likewise users that cannot find information on an internet site will look elsewhere for products and services losing the company revenue.

SharePoint 2007 introduced some powerful tools for improving findability but fell short when it compared to larger Enterprise Content Management systems. SharePoint 2010 takes this a huge step forward with cutting edge enterprise ready findability features. Here are 10 new features SharePoint 2010 brings to the table in addition to the features available in SharePoint 2007.

1. Metadata driven navigation

SharePoint 2010 provides a rich set of features that allow users to use metadata to navigate content repositories. Document libraries can be configured to show navigation based on both the corporate taxonomy (or managed metadata) and combined with other metadata filters. For example with a you can filter items from the ‘Gears’ product category of content type ‘Sales presentation’ using the navigation as shown below.



2. Search enhancements

SharePoint 2010 includes some impressive enhancements to the search experience. Search facets allow users to filter the results by relevant metadata such as author or content type. Relevancy is improved as it takes the number of views into account. These features, along with the addition of related queries, improved query syntax and thumbnail previews can help users locate the content they are after.

3. Ratings

The introduction of a ratings field allows community driven content classification. Ratings can be used to improve findability through sortable list columns, or by the creation of ‘highest rated documents’ rollups using the Content Query Web Part, allowing users to see popular content in prominent places.



4. Tagging

SharePoint 2010 includes a tag cloud web part that provides a visual representation of the metadata associated with the content inside a repository. Additionally tag profile pages contain lists of items such as sites, documents or people tagged with a particular term as well as a list of community members and discussions, facilitating information retrieval.

5. Document IDs

SharePoint 2010 provides a unique Document ID service that can be used to create absolute references to content regardless of file renames or content moves. As well as resulting in a reduction in broken links the Document ID can be used to search for an individual document and the format of the ID is configurable allowing organisations to create meaningful document identifiers.




All the findability improvements mentioned above rely on the correct classification of content in the first place. The following five finability improvements aid the correct classification and organisation of content SharePoint 2010.

6. Managed metadata service

SharePoint 2010 now includes a dedicated service for managing metadata within the enterprise. The managed metadata service allows content owners to maintain a centrally managed structured taxonomy as well as allowing users to contribute to an unstructured folksonomy in the form of managed keywords. This makes it much easier for users to classify content, and guides users to use consistent terms, improving the quality of metadata in the system.

Structured classification:



Unstructured classification:



7. Shared content types

One key architectural limitation in SharePoint 2007 was that Content Types could not be shared between site collections. This resulted in the duplication of content types and associated lookup lists which could become out of sync over time. SharePoint 2010 removes this limitation and thus improves the consistency of information stored in different site collections or even separate SharePoint farms.

8. Location based metadata defaults

SharePoint 2010 allows you to set metadata defaults at the document library and folder level. This means that users do not have to enter the same metadata over and over if they are uploading content into a repository that has a shared set of metadata.



9. Content Organiser

In SharePoint 2007 the location in which content was stored was largely up to the end users. The Content Organiser in SharePoint 2010 helps alleviate problems caused by users uploading documents to a variety of different places by allowing routing decisions to be centrally managed. Content can then be routed to the correct location based on the content type and other metadata values. This helps the user to focus on providing quality metadata and results in a well organised repository.

10. Document Sets

A document set allows you to manage a group of documents as a single entity. The ability to apply metadata to the entire set of documents improves consistency and storing related documents together can help users find relevant material easily.

Summary

SharePoint 2010 delivers some massive platform improvements that help in the classification and retrieval of content. It is important to note, however, that the toolset is only a small part of an information management strategy. Information management should start with clear business objectives, a clear strategy and appropriate focus areas before technology is involved. Once this is in place, however, the significant advancements of SharePoint 2010 make it a more obvious technology choice for content management that ever before.

Guest Author: Ari Bakker

Ari Bakker is a SharePoint focused Technical Lead at London-based digital agency cScape. He is an active member of the SharePoint community and has spoken at SharePoint user group events in New Zealand and Australia. Ari will be presenting on “creating a metadata driven information architecture using SharePoint 2007” at the SharePoint Evolution Conference in London next week.

Ari blogs regularly at http://www.sharepointconfig.com and tweets via @aribakker.