Managed Meta Data Service in SharePoint 2010– I

 

Managed meta data is a hierarchical collection of centrally managed terms that you can define and then subsequently use them as attributes for various items in SharePoint 2010. The Keywords and the collections can be stored and managed independently from their actual association in the application.

The different components of Managed Meta data are

• Groups : The group is the container which hosts one or more term sets. These term sets in turn host the Terms which can be used for characterizing the items in the List / Library.
• Terms: A term is a keyword or a combination of keywords (Phrase) which can be associated with one or more items in SharePoint 2010.
• Term Sets: A term Set is a collection of similar terms which can be structured in a hierarchical manner.
• Managed Terms:
• Managed Keywords:

There are two types of Terms available :

Local Terms : is a collection of terms within the context of a site collection. if for example you create a new column

Global Terms : are created outside the context of the site collection.

There are two ways of adding the Terms in the “Term Store Management Tool”. Adding the terms directly by going to the “Central Administration” –> “Manage Service Application” –> “Managed Metadata Service” –> “Term Store Management Tool”.

Hint: In the central administration, If you don’t get an option of manipulating the terms then it basically means that the user does not have proper access to the tool. you should add the user to the “Term Store Administrators”.

you can also add the terms by importing a csv file of keywords.

The Terms added through the “Term Store Management tool” are global in nature.

The process of including the tags in the Tasks involves the following activities:

• Create a Column Managed Metadata in the List / Library
• Select the Term Set that will be used to characterize the items in the List / Library.
• Select the Tags for the individual items in the List / Library.

 

Supported Term Types

SharePoint provides support for two different types of terms:

• Equivalent Terms
• Hierarchical Terms

Equivalent Term Types

SharePoint provides support for synonyms or most preferred terms. For e.g., MCSD corresponds to “Microsoft Certified Software Developer”. This provides fair information about the equivalence amount of information for a specific word.

Hierarchical Term Types

This helps in setting the information hierarchy across the organization and helps in categorizing the data.

For e.g., Organization –> Departments-> Sub Departments—> Functional Areas etc..

Advantages of Managed Metadata

The managed meta data can be used in many ways:

• It provides a consistency in documents and information classification. Since the information is stored at a central repository and the end users are expected to select on or more of the managed keywords for each of the items, it helps in virtual classification  of documents and records across all the items.
• Search Support and Behavior: A analysis of the keywords will help in understanding the search behavior of the users.
• In an advanced scenarios these behavior information can be used to provide the adequate consistent information in presenting the content to the user while using the Search based architecture to present the content to the user.
• An hierarchical view of search keywords can be used to perform the hierarchical classification of data and drill down support.