Making the most of SharePoint 2010 Document Management-Creating and Using Managed Terms and Keywords

 

Before you start creating your various document libraries or lists. You may want to think about the metadata that you will use for  tagging of different types of documents, calendar events, announcements.  Here, I am referring  to keywords or terms such as “inspection codes”, “cost centres” , "absence codes”,  “regions”,  “countries, “privacy levels” etc.   You are therefore  likely to  want these incorporated in a consistent classification available to all  intranet or extranet users including any suppliers, subcontractors.  Additionally, if you are merging sites managed by other organisations you may want to have a mechanism for harmonising their tagging with yours when applied to similar types of content.

SharePoint 2010 server and enterprise (not foundation) provides the metadata service application as a mechanism for meeting the above requirements.  Both managed terms ( hierarchical) and keywords (unstructured) are managed through its user interface.

In this article I will cover

• The metadata service application, term set groups (local and global), term sets, terms and enterprise keywords
• The roles who will manage or contribute to the various term sets
• How you can quickly go about populating the term store with  managed terms and keywords
• Utilising  these  stored terms and keyword inc dynamic column filters, navigation that  lists and libraries to create instant views.  Also, enabling social tagging to express interest in certain types of content.

 

As regards the intended target audience.  I assume you or the SharePoint admin in your organisation has installed the metadata service and you’ve some understanding as to its function.

 

Managed Metadata Service Instance

SharePoint 2010 ( Server and Enterprise) provides  Managed Metadata Service (MMS) application for storing the managed terms.  Each  MMS instance, known also as a  term store is held  single database and as a service application it can supply managed terms to multiple web apps in the farm.  In an extranet scenario you may want to create additional term stores, say for external: suppliers or clients.  The internal users would typically be able to get access to all term stores whereas the external users may only see a specific term store.

Assuming your term store has been created by the farm admin.

1. Navigate to your SharePoint Farm: Central Admin –> Managed Service Applications
2. Select the Managed Metadata Service

 

Term Set Groups

Manage terms are consumed by the site collections provisioned under each web app. Which  mean users who have access the site collection can tag their content with these terms.   Like terms live in a term set that is managed through term set groups; referred to normally as groups. The visibility of the terms is determined by which groups they are held under.

Local

Each site collection will have automatically have a single special group created for it through metadata service instance.  It will hold term sets and terms that will be locally scoped, so only available from within the site collection that owns the local group.

 

Locally scoped terms have some inherent disadvantages over globally scoped terms. Namely,  their  terms can easily be duplicated if defined in other site collections. Also, terms can be “lost” during a backup and restore cycle of a site collection. I would recommend that these are kept to a minimum unless there is specific business justification.

Global

Conversely,  groups created by term store administrators at the managed metadata service instance or enterprise level. These groups are available to any site collection ( through its web app) that consumes the service.  Hence, any term sets and their constituent terms are considered globally scoped.

I would recommend that most groups be defined at this level. Note,  You can delegate (term set) group administration to certain users or groups.  in which case, they will have special access to only their designated groups through Central Admin. I will cover these roles shortly in this post.

 

Terms and Term Sets

A term set refers to like terms arranged in hierarchical structure of phrases is known as a terms.   Such an arrangement can be also considered a taxonomy  e.g. "General Business Taxonomy"

 

You can configure certain properties for the term set that assist with its management and use, including

• Submission Policy whether you want users to be able to add new terms from the UI. In this case,  you just want the term set owner ( or group contributors) to do this, so leave “Closed”
• Available for Tagging whether you want your users able to tag content with it. In this case, “General Business Taxonomy” is far too general so leave unchecked.  However, you may want to allow tagging for any of the terms under “Accounting and Finance” so this would be checked.

 

Roles

As discussed earlier you will want to delegate the responsibility of  management certain functions of the term store to specific users or groups.

Group Name	Description
Term Store Administrators	Groups or users that have permissions to create new term set groups.   They will then have permissions to access a metadata service application instance through Central Admin without needing to have farm admin permissions.
Group Manager	You can delegate the administration the groups held the term store. Assigned users or group names will both contributor permissions and the ability to add users or group, names to the contributor role for that (term set) group.  In this way groups created for say department in your organisation: HR, Marketing etc. can be represented in the term store by their each of their respected group managers. By default a site collection administrator will also have group manager permission for the special group automatically created for the site collection.
Contributors	Assigned users or group names  who will have the permissions to create and edit the term set hierarchies.

 

Moss Blog tip: At this moment in time. Term Store administrators, group managers and group contributors who are not site collection administrators; will not have access to the term store though the usual Site Actions -> Site Settings. Instead, they will directly access the  term store from the site collection  via an URL such as:

http://your_domain.com/_Layouts/termstoremanager.aspx.

The global groups are located above the local groups on the left hand side of the term store  UI.

 

Enterprise Keywords

Enterprise Keywords is where you store unstructured values used for tagging content in a similar way to twitter #tags.  You can add new keywords  to documents in your document libraries by clicking on the Tags and Notes ribbon bar button.

When adding a keyword tag to a document you will notice previously entered keywords are displayed as suggested keywords.

 

Alternatively, you can add enterprise keywords directly from the term store.

1. Navigate to your SharePoint Farm: Central Admin –> Managed Service Applications
2. Select the Managed Metadata Service
3. Expand System to expose Keywords
4. Click on the dropdown menu and select New Keyword

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Keywords are held in a flat or  unstructured arrangement  and can be added informally by any user with Contribute permissions. Hence, you might be tempted  to restrict their use – one project Manager I worked with recently went visibly pale at the thought of the pilot users entering their own keywords! However,  since the tags are user-generated you are more likely to get collective  user "buy-in"  to the concept of tagging content they create or upload. Also,  you or members of the content management group in your organisation could monitor the keywords being added by the various users. Keywords that keep being repeatedly used can be moved into a the hierarchy of a  globally scoped term set.  Without having any impact on the documents tagged with the keyword.  Since the keyword is now a managed term; you are free,  to add  labels (synonyms) and, or language translations.

Setting up  your Term Data

As part of your pilot project you can start to create groups, term sets and terms that you will want to your users to apply the content they store. In this section I will cover a couple of ways of setting up your term data.

 

Manually Creating your Terms

Term store managers can add the term hierarchies manually in the term store UI.  As you start typing the first character of your new term the term store will suggest previously entered terms that begin with this character.

 

 

Import an Available Industry Standard Taxonomy

In your organisation you may have terms that are widely used within your industrial sector.  If these are available in the correct format then these can manually imported into the Term Store .  For example, DataFacet provide a free download:  The General Business Taxonomy for SharePoint 2010 , formatted as a compliant CSV file.  Simply click on the above link and fill in the contact form and click on the link in the subsequent confirmation email

1. Navigate to your SharePoint Farm: Central Admin –> Managed Service Applications
2. Select the Managed Metadata Service
3. Create a new term set group or select one of your existing groups.
4. Select the group and from the dropdown menu select Import Term Set.

 

Now, you are free to select which terms are available for tagging, change default label and add other labels that reflect the terms you use within your organisation.

 

Note,   another approach to getting a previously created taxonomy is to create one your self.  Possible options include:

• Create a batch export from your HR, procurement, sales system etc into the correct CSV file format
• Ask a developer to exploit the Taxonomy API to create your term taxonomy.

 

Modify and import the provided sample ImportTermSet.csv

Microsoft give a head start by providing a link to sample import CSV file in term store.  During your pilot phase you can then edit this and replace the terms with ones that are applicable to your organisation.  The only caveat is that you cannot add  labels or language translations.  These can be added later after the import.

 

Once imported the taxonomy as is will shows the following terms.

 

Using your Managed Terms and Keywords

Now that you have created managed terms or  enterprise keywords you will want to leverage these in your various sites.

 

Add Term To A Document Library

Here you can add a new column based on managed metadata.  A managed metadata column is like a standard lookup column on steroids!  This means it will be structured and is managed centrally.  Also it is easily reused  by any site collection that consumes terms from the term store.

Here I will add an Access Level column to one of the document libraries.  In this case the Access Level column enhances the security model in SharePoint by indicating the intended audience document is once it is published.  For example a document with an Acess Level of  "Top Secret" may trigger a workflow that moves the document into a designed document library or folder that has restricted access.  Alternatively,  content routing for documents with "Top Secret"  Access level would mean they will always be moved to restrictted folders not matter where they were origina

 

1. Navigate to the  desired document library.
2. In the ribbon bar,  click on Documents –>  Library Settings
3. Under the Columns click Create column
4. Enter “Access Level” in the Column name
5. Select Managed Metadata
6. Search for Access and click on the upper level term as this will allow the users to select from the range of  lower level terms in the hierarchy.
7. In this case you will not allow users to add their own terms to be added to the Access term structure.  Note,  the Customise your term set option looks innocent enough. However, this would add terms to the local group for the site collection which for the reasons previously discussed is not such a good idea.
8. Click Ok and return to the Project Office document library
9. If you edit the properties of the documents in the library you can select the desired Access Level from the hierarchical list.
10. 

Set up the Metadata and Choice Fields Navigation Hierarchies

Here your can select the  choice fields and managed metadata fields that you have defined for the either the document library:  columns or the content types.  These will included in the special navigation for the document library.  In this case I want to the navigator to show documents, both in the main library or in any folder based on the users selection of certain fields, namely Access Level and Issue Type

1. Navigate to the desired document library.
2. In the ribbon bar, click on Documents –> Library Settings
3. Click on Metadata navigation.
4. Drag across Access Level, Content type and Issue Type
5. Navigate to Project Office Document Library.
6. Click on one of the navigators in the left panel. For example to show any document that has Top Secret access level, regardless of which folder it resides in.  Then navigate down the Access Level tree and select Top Secret

Use Metadata Quick Filters

Another aspect of Metadata navigation is the ability to filter on terms in a drop down.

1. Navigate to the Project Office Document Library
2. Click on the Access Level column drop down and select the desired value  to view only the documents with that  Access Level return on the documents t

Set up the Metadata and Choice Fields Key Filters

In addition to the metadata and choice fields navigators you can also set up filters on certain key fields in your document library

1. Navigate to the desired document library.
2. In the ribbon bar, click on Documents –> Library Settings
3. Click on Metadata navigation.
4. Scroll down to Configure Key Filters
5. Drag across Client
6. Click Ok and navigate to Document library
7. In the bottom left of the Quick Links Panel
8. Select the desired ‘Client B from the drop down to filter only on documents for  client B

Enterprise Metadata and Keyword Settings

You can add an enterprise tagging column the document library.  This new column will appear in the file upload form  when you upload a document to the library.  Also you might want to synchronise any tags with activity feeds on my sites to find tagged content you have expressed an interest in.

1. Navigate to the desired document library.
2. In the ribbon bar, click on Documents –> Library Settings
3. Click on Enterprise Metadata and Keyword Settings

Add Tagging to Documents

Adding tagging or notes documents

1. Navigate to the desired document library.
2. Select the document you wish to tag
3. In the ribbon bar, click on Tags and Notes
4. 
5. Add the desired tag . Note previously entered tags will appear as suggestions.

 

Limitations when using Managed Terms

Michael Pisarek describes these in detail here: Managed Column Limitations.  So it is worth reviewing his post  before addressing a given business requirement with an enterprise column.

 

Closing Thoughts

Hopefully,  you can now see the potential in setting up a term store.  I will be interested to know about the various ways you have exploited; what I consider to be one of the key features of SharePoint 2010 server,  in your organisation.

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