Managing SharePoint Metadata
February 8, 2011
Last week in a client meeting, the question, “What does Microsoft suggest a SharePoint administrator do to manage metadata?” There were a number of suggestions discussed. Our contribution was providing a link to “Introduction to managed metadata in SharePoint Server 2010.” The knowledge base document is quite interesting and does contain some useful insights. What is clear from the explanation of SharePoint metadata is that a human must play a role in a number of the tasks.
One example is user assigned tags. The buzzword for this is “folksonomy”. If the user selects additional tags from a controlled term list, there are some, but not major downsides, to the assignment of metatags. If the user can assign any term in a “free form mode”, the potential for some glitches increases sharply. The problem is particularly acute when an important document is tagged with an idiosyncratic term and the other metadata are plucked from the title of the document and the system provided data such as date and time.
The Microsoft document discusses the tension between controlled term and uncontrolled term indexing. The article provides a useful graphic, which certainly encapsulates the problem of finding a particular document or other information object such as an Excel sheet with related data.
The problem can be ameliorated using a third party tool which adds a layer of intelligence to the metatagging used in a SharePoint environment. The challenge is to make decisions about the specific tagging approach for a SharePoint installation.
SharePoint’s built in tools are useful. However, third party solutions from companies like SurfRay add additional functionality and can eliminate most of the human intervention that becomes mandatory when indexing policies are not clearly specified. For more information about the Ontolica approach to leveraging metadata for SharePoint into useful navigation and exploration tools, point your browser to http://www.surfray.com/products/ontolica-enterprise-search.html
Torben Ellert, February 8, 2011
SurfRay
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