In this chapter, we're going to discuss one of the more powerful aspects of SharePoint—metadata. We're all familiar with the information we're putting into SharePoint Online in the form of documents, spreadsheets, images, and such. Metadata is the detailed information about the documents and artifacts, either stored as part of the document or in additional fields somewhere in SharePoint Online.
A document might be about a particular business process, but the metadata about the document will include such things as the author's name, department, the date the document was created or updated, the subject of the document, or keywords and phrases that we might use when searching for the document. Organizing and managing metadata will help your users to locate the resources they need more efficiently.
Configuring and using managed metadata brings a lot of advantages to a SharePoint environment:
- Consistency: Using managed metadata and term sets allows users to select from predefined terms, ensuring consistency in spelling and phrasing.
- Improved discoverability: By using consistent names and terminology across your enterprise, you improve the ability for users to search for content and refine results.
- Metadata-driven navigation: Metadata can be used to create navigation elements for sites based on terms, as well as creating dynamic views of information in libraries and lists.
- Increased flexibility: Because of the ease of updating term sets, you can quickly update the classification of items across the organization. For example, if a business updates or changes products, administrators can merge terms in a term set. Or, if similar terms are discovered, administrators can merge the terms so that all of the duplicative or similar terms are linked to one term. In either case, all of the content previously tagged with either of the terms is updated.
The topics covered in this chapter are as follows:
- Planning for and configuring managed metadata
- Planning and configuring Term Store security
- Planning and configuring term store structure