Managed Metadata and Taxonomies in SharePoint

Playing Tag:
Managed Metadata and Taxonomies in SharePoint 2010
SharePoint Saturday San Diego
February 2011
Chris McNulty

About Me
• Working with SharePoint technologies since 2000/2001
• 20 years consulting and financial services technology
(Santander, John Hancock, GMO, State Street)
• MBA in Investment Management from Boston College
Carroll School of Management
• Write and speak often on Microsoft IW technologies
(blogs & books)
• Microsoft MCSE/MCTS/MSA/MVTS

About KMA
• Full-service IT consulting firm established in 1995
• 29 employees: Partner, PM, Analyst, Developer, QA
• Microsoft technology focus:
• Microsoft Gold Certified Partner / Working with
SharePoint technologies since 2001
• Specialties in
• Collaboration: Portals, Communities and Content
Management
• Insight: Enterprise Search and Business Intelligence
• Productivity: Forms and Office Client
Customization, Mekko Graphics (ISV)

About Home

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Twitter hashtag: Copyright 2010 © Knowledge Management Associates, LLC. All rights reserved.
Twitterhashtag: #spsny

About Home

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Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 … the bright frontier

Eastern Long Island, July 4, 2010

Agenda
• Metadata – definitions and taxonomy
• Usage scenarios
• Folksonomy usage
• Taxonomy management
• Tags and social networking
• Content type hubs and publishing
• Configuration Overview & Design Tips

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What is metadata?
• Literally, “after data”
• In practical usage, it means data about data
• For SharePoint, it usually means data that describes or
classifies other data (lists) or documents (libraries)

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Terminology

• Taxonomy – A formal hierarchy of terms and tags, usually
centrally administered and defined
• Folksonomy - Informal list of ad-hoc tags or terms,
usually built up over time through user defined keywords
(Thomas Vanderwal – “people’s taxonomy”)
• Term Store – A database that houses taxonomies
• Term Set – The “second level” of a taxonomy
• Term – (a/k/a “tag”) An element of the defined taxonomy

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SharePoint Content Terminology

• Content Type – A reusable collection of settings and
rules applied to a certain category of content in
SharePoint.
• Content Type Hub – A site collection which operates
as a central source to share content types across the
enterprise
• Content Type Syndication – Publishing content types
across multiple sites, site collections, web application
and/or farms.

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The bright frontier - 2010 Managed
Metadata Service
• Centralized enterprise
repository for tag
hierarchies and
keywords
• Publish and subscribe
model for distributed
content types

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Scenario: Growth of an Information Architecture

• New company starts to
develop products
• “X21 Screen Cleaner” is Products

Product Information
the first product
• Products team has a
SharePoint site with a
folder for product
information
• Simple storage and
navigation

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• Company hires its first
marketing specialist
Products
• Adds a folder to the Product Information

library for marketing
content Marketing Information

• Multiple products, but
all information still in
one spot

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• In six months,
marketing grows to a
department, gets its Products

Product Information
own site
Marketing
• Document physical Marketing Information

storage becomes de
facto taxonomy

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Information Architecture Questions
• “I’m in the marketing group, and I just finished a new
product sheet for the X-21 project – do I keep it on my
site, or on the products site, or save it to both places?”
• “I’m in the product group, and there’s a product
information sheet for the X21 Screen Cleaner – is that
the most recent version, or do I have to double check on
another site?”
• “I’m searching for information on the X-21 product – do
we call it ‘X21’, or ‘X-21’? Why can’t we use both?”

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IA Answers - Demo
• Tag sharing across multiple sites/collections
– Products and Screen Cleaners

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Folksonomy
• Informal list of ad-hoc tags or terms, usually built up
over time through user defined keywords
• Centrally stored in the MMS application
• Easily enabled for each document library

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Social tagging
• Tagging activities are always available form a
common UI
• Tags are aggregated to each users profile page
• Tags themselves get profile pages

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Demo
• Adding Managed Keywords to a library
• Tagging and terms
• Tags on personal profiles
• Tag profiles

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Taxonomy
• Creating and managing
terms and term sets
• Attaching to a library
• Taxonomy navigation

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Demo
• Term sets and terms
• Metadata fields
• Navigation

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Content Type Hubs
• Define one master site Managed Metadata Service Application

collection to house
master content types
• Publish and Primary Site Collection

Content Type Hub

synchronize across
multiple farm and or Other Site Collection

site collections Local Content Types Subscribed Content Types

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Search
• Tags are
automatically
crawled
properties
• All tags and terms
are available as
left hand
“refinements”

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Design Considerations
• Dynamic external tags
• Tag security
• Openness vs. closed term sets
• Federated administration
• Content types & site columns - practical guidance
• Role of Master Data Services in SQL 2008 R2
• Programmability

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Design – Dynamic External Tags
• One way data import
limits
• BCS provides alternative
tag techniques
• BCS data source can be
maintained externally, or
by publishing the source
as an External List.
– External Lists act almost
identically to native
SharePoint lists in the UI.

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Design - Security
• Security is limited to the term set level
• All child terms inherit this visibility setting
• What you can’t do is this:
– Tag (Viewers)
• Northwind (Andy & Bob)
• Contoso (All Employees)
• Oracle (Executive Team Only)

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Design - Openness
• Folksonomy - Managed Keywords are usually “open”, and
allow users to add new terms interactively through
tagging.
• Taxonomy - Managed term stores are usually closed, and
require administrators to add new terms.
• Open folksonomies and closed taxonomies is a good
practice.
– May become a best practice
– Watch trends in casual social tags and evaluate “promotion” to
formal taxonomy.

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Design - Shared Service Applications
• The 2007 Shared Services User Profiles

Provider has been broken Search Metadata

up.
• Each of its elements is now Excel Calc
Visio
a Shared Service
Application
• MMS is also a Shared
Service Application
• Records/librarians/IA can
administer metadata
without becoming farm http://globalweb http://itportal

admins

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Design – Content Types
• Use Document ID function uniformly among hub and
subscribers – otherwise content types aren't published
• Check logs for content publishing if you have questions
– Republish and use options & timer jobs to “force” updates
• Site columns, especially choice lists, can behave unexpectedly.
– Column definitions and lookup values will be copied to each separate
site collection
– Lookup values can be locally edited and changed.
– They reset to master values the next time the content type is
published.
• Changes to Content Organizer, Records Management and
Retention Policy reduce the need for more content types

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Design for SQL 2008 R2 Master Data
Services
• Not just for BI!
• Centralized repository of facts for metadata,
dimensions, etc.
– Provides Hierarchy of attributes and entities
– Security, workflow, data batching and forensics
• Coexistence
– Export from MDS to MMS; requires code for deltas
– Consume MMS data into MDS
– More to come…

Twitter hashtag:

Demo – Administration
• Central Admin
– Federated Administration
– Create term sets
– Create terms and tags
– Dynamic external “tags”
• Content Hubs
• Search

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Physical and Logical Design
• Use Content Type Organizer rule to move new
documents based on initial tags
• Use taxonomy and metadata to drive information
lifecycle management processes (e.g. archiving)
– Improve browsability and search relevance

Twitter hashtag:

Programming & Customization
• C# use
Microsoft.SharePoint.Taxonomy
• PowerShell
• Native web parts to
display tag clouds
• Easily built web
parts to add
statistics on tag
usage
• Ask me for a sample!

Twitter hashtag:

IA Solutions
• Use MMS to centrally define product tags to be shared across
multiple sites and libraries
• Create centralized document repositories (Document Center)
• Define a term store for all departments
• Managed Metadata field in Document Center for Department
• Content Type Organizer rule to move new documents tagged
as “Departments:Marketing” to a Marketing folder in the Doc
Center
• Add a new “Departments” Managed Metadata field to
Content Types in our collaboration sites and Document
Center, and set default to “Departments:Marketing”

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Dark Secrets of MMS

Twitter hashtag:

Dark Secrets of MMS
• No granular security on tag definitions or tags as applied
• No meta-metadata
– You can define products and group them hierarchically, but you
can’t add a list price and then navigate or refine to find content
by price
– Can’t tag a tag, can’t rate a tag, can’t “like” a tag
– Can’t organize “personal” tags
• Client application support limitations
– SharePoint Workspace 2010 can read but not write MMS tags
– InfoPath browser client can’t read or write MMS tags

Twitter hashtag:

The 9 10 Some Adoption Rules
1. Start small. Do NOT put everything in a term set.
2. Find “ friendlies”. Introduce keywords to users who understand the benefits
3. Use default tags in context.
4. External data. Use BCS if tag definitions are outside SharePoint (G/L codes)
5. Understand the security model and don’t put “secret” terms in a term store.
6. Extend administrative access for nontraditional administrators (e.g. corporate
records staff)
7. Plan for and deploy centralized content types.
8. If security requirements are simple - and document sharing is important, use the
Document Center to centralize document storage, and use content types and
tags to classify docs.
9. Watch usage patterns for keywords and search. Unused typos in a keyword field
(e.g. “holidya list”) can be deleted, and new project names can be promoted!
10. Synonyms! Synonyms! Synonyms!
11. Taxonomy does NOT belong to IT!!!

Twitter hashtag:

Resources - General
• From Microsoft:
– SharePoint 2010 site: http://sharepoint.microsoft.com
– SharePoint Team Blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint
• From KMA (www.kma-llc.net)
– Monthly webinars on SharePoint 2010 (EPM, upgrades, etc.)
• March 2011: SharePoint for PMOs
– White papers, blogs, presentations, news, and events
– New Web Part for accessing tag statistics
• From me
– SharePoint Saturday Redmond March 5 (MMS)
– Boston Area SharePoint User Group March 9 (Business Intelligence)
– SharePoint Saturday Boston – April 9 2011
– Microsoft TechEd Atlanta – May 2011
– SPTechCon Boston – June 2011 (BI & MMS)

Twitter hashtag:

• Open Questions
• Contact Me
• Ask the community
• Microsoft Product
Management for
Metadata
Twitter hashtag:

Thank you…
• Contact Details
– Email cmcnulty@kma-llc.net
– Blog http://blogs.kma-llc.net/microknowledge
– Twitter: @cmcnulty2000
– LinkedIn:http://www.linkedin.com/in/cmcnulty

Twitter hashtag:

Managed Metadata and Taxonomies in SharePoint

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