Tagging, Metadata, and Taxonomy in SharePoint
In my presentations on the 11 Strategic Considerations for SharePoint Migration at various SharePoint events, I make the point again and again that metadata and taxonomy management is the single most important factor in a successful SharePoint implementation. Metadata is the glue that binds within SharePoint. It powers search. It enables social computing. It drives enterprise content management strategies.
Not surprisingly, understanding – and have a strategy for – SharePoint metadata and taxonomy is one of the most critical areas for migration planning. With SharePoint 2010, there are more options for end users and administrators to control and manage metadata and taxonomy, which in turn will improve search and power many of the new out-of-the-box SharePoint features. When people learn about the ability to manage centralized term groups and user-driven tagging ‘folksonomies’ they tend to get excited about moving to SharePoint, but its not a simple migration to the new platform, flip a switch, and it all works. In fact, if you don’t have a plan for SharePoint 2010, my recommendation is to turn the Managed Metadata Service off. It is critical that you set up a governance model to guide this process, or your metadata management will quickly get out of hand.
Let’s back up and look at some of the causes of poor metadata and taxonomy in SharePoint, and identify possible areas for improvement within your organization:
- Ad-hoc content creation and migration leads to junk piling up in the portal.
- Legacy content from file shares, legacy portals, or end user PCs gets migrated slowly, if at all.
- Inconsistent taxonomy is applied across farms and site collections.
- People author locally instead of utilizing online resources and using versioning, multiplying problems globally.
- Authors don’t apply metadata at all, making search more of a “shotgun” approach. If you know the name and where to find it, your search will be successful. If not, good luck.
- Authors apply metadata without common classification, which improves the search experience for specific artifacts, but is an inefficient authoring experience.
As a result of this poor planning and execution, your portal lacks high fidelity search, end users can’t find the right content, and you find yourself with poor portal adoption and low user satisfaction.
While there is no overnight solution, you can definitely solve this problem as part of your migration planning effort. Begin by mapping out your enterprise-level taxonomy, understanding the structure of your web applications and site collections, and identify which data schemas (Content Types) can and should be centralized. It will take time to clean up and organize your taxonomy and folksonomy structures, but you can leverage much of the work you did for your MOSS 2007 environment (assuming you tried to manage your taxonomy in your legacy system). Have a clear picture of your current state environment (what is working, what is lacking) and future state (how you need your environment to work to meet business and operational requirements) so that you can identify any gaps in capability as you stage your migration to 2010.
For help with cleaning up your MOSS 2007 metadata, Axceler offers the echo for SharePoint platform. With echo, you can clean up, organize, and restructure your metadata and content types, online or offline, using an Excel spreadsheet. This allows you to work closely with your end users to make sure your taxonomy is strong going into your SharePoint 2010 migration. You can read more on echo here. If you’re ready to migrate to SharePoint 2010, you can learn more about our Davinci Migrator here.