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From a basic concept, SharePoint has been designed to allow the end-users of the application to not simply just “use” a technology, however put the power of creation and design back in to their hands.  Ultimately, end-users now have the ability to create and implement concepts, strategies and functionality through the use of a highly friendly Graphical User Interface (GUI – pronounced gooey).  Coupled with other products, such as SharePoint Designer, slowing fading are the days of old where end-users relied solely on their IT departments to design, build, implement, and maintain the application across the enterprise.  Now that power is being embraced and utilized by tech-savvy end-users.

The capabilities of SharePoint 2007 were groundbreaking, empowering enterprises to collaborate cross-functionally on a global scale.  The introduction of metadata versus file folders, sites and pages to bring content and users together in one area, simple yet effective out of the box workflows, and of course enterprise search.  All of these capabilities have demonstrated an increase in everything from and increased employee user experience to productivity and efficiency gains, ultimately driving increased ROI.

With the introduction of SharePoint 2010, there are a lot of really great technological enhancements and functionality that will further increase the ease and use of the application.  However, the biggest gain I see is through the understanding and control of the velocity of information contained within an organization.  The speed at which information is created, coupled with the speed in which it is consumed, presents significant challenges for end-users to find and use information as well as for IT departments to control the amount of data ultimately stored.

With this challenge, the further enhancements around metadata coupled with the introduction of “tagging” capabilities will significantly enhance the way end-user consume these massive amounts of data.  It makes sense, that with the introduction and success of Facebook, Twitter, etc, classifying data has allowed the masses to quickly and efficiently find and consume information with topics covering just about everything you can think of.  This concept is no different in any organization.  So let’s take a closer look at metadata management and tagging.

There are many benefits that are inherent with metadata management and tagging, such as:

·         Enhancing navigation and findability

o   Taxonomy (top-down) with Folksonomy (bottom-up)

·         Allowing for improved search (keywords, terms, term-sets, etc)

·         Security tagging (ediscovery, legal holds, retention)

·         Improved personalization (tag clouds, related content)

With this new functionality, there are several key pieces of information we need to understand prior to getting our feet wet.  SharePoint 2010 has some new “vocabulary” to work with in order to properly implement this functionality.

TERM: This is the basic building block or foundation to any classification schema.  It is any type of word, phrase, etc that is used to “describe” or be “associated to” a piece of content.

                Example: Golden

TERM SET:  This is a group of terms that are related to each other in some type of fashion.  A term set can be thought of as a typical taxonomical hierarchy of like terms.

                Example: Retriever

                                                Golden

                                                Labrador

So our term set describes a group of like-type dogs being Retrievers, and the individual terms that are “associated” to them are Golden and Labrador.  This type of metadata classification is done through the end-user, giving them the power to organize their data accordingly. 

However, the question that still remains is how do we manage information across the enterprise?  The answer is through the use of Managed Metadata and the Term Store.  Prior knowing what this is, how it works and how to implement it (this is the next post), we need to understand two more critical words and how they relate to the two previous examples.

MANAGED TERM: This is when a user with appropriate security permissions is allowed to take a user-generated term and place a “control” around it.  The “control” is simply the ability to store the term in to a term store, where end-users can now re-use the term as a piece of controlled vocabulary.

MANAGED KEYWORD: This is a fancy way of saying “tag”.  End-users have the permissions to create managed keywords (tags).  When they do, the keywords  are placed in to a non-hierarchical list within Central Administration allowing Information Architects to easily create a Folksonomical hierarchy or navigation structure.  Users with proper permission can convert keywords in to managed terms.