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Monday, May 21, 2012

Metadata - Terms, Term Set, Term Store Management Tool

Metadata refers to a structured way of presenting information about entities like, documents, people. In lay man terms, it is generally called ‘data about data‘. The main purpose of capturing metadata is to easily identify or locate the content that we are looking for.


The techniques used for optimally managing these metadata values is called ‘Metadata Management'. An easy-to-use framework has been provided by SharePoint 2010 which deals with usage of a set of centrally managed words which can be used across multiple sites as tags or attributes.

There are a number of new features that have been introduced in SharePoint 2010.

When it comes to Metadata, these are some of the basic things that we must know

1. ‘Terms‘: It refers to a word or phase that can be associated with every item.

2. ‘Term Set‘: It refers to a collection of Terms. Termsets can either be created locally or globally.

Termsets created within the scope of a site collection are referred to as Local Termsets and the ones created outside the context of a Site collection are referred to as Global Termsets.

Termset Groups are generally created by a ‘Term Store Administrator'. He designates a ‘Group Manager‘ who creates the Termsets that have to be used in lists/libraries.

"Terms' can further be classified into two categories:

1. ‘Managed Terms‘ – These are the predefined set of terms (words/ phrases) that are created by authorized users.

2. ‘Enterprise Keywords‘ – A number of tags (Keywords) are generated by the users. These are stored in an non-hierarchial list called ‘Keywords Set‘.

Inorder to pre-define the Termsets and Keywords to be used in sites, Microsoft SharePoint Team has provided a tool called ‘Term Store Management Tool‘. Some of the operations that we might want to perform using the tool are :

1. Create, modify or delete term sets and terms

2. Organize terms into a hierarchy

3. Import new terms from a .csv file

4. Promote keywords to terms.

Some of the advantages of using Managed Metadata are:
1. Consistent usage of terms and keywords across content.

2. Better search results.

Conclusion:

A number of new features have been introduced in SP 2010, which enable better centralized management of metadata which plays a key role in organizing content in every organization. Each of these features play a critical role in making SharePoint Platform a good ECM System.

Source : Internet

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