The long expected successor of MOSS 2007, SharePoint 2010 will launch on May 12. We are all very excited about this! The last couple of months we have been working with the new version and we would like to give you an overview of the key new features regarding metadata and classification.
In the coming weeks we will dive deeper into other aspects of the platform: Search, Social Features, Offline access and Workflow.
Term store
The Term store is a service application that can be setup to manage metadata across farms, web applications and site collections.
Taxonomy and Folksonomy
Within the term store metadata can be managed top-down (taxonomy) or bottom-up (folksonomy). This means that an organisation can have an official taxonomy but at the same time provide users with the ability to add free tags to content as they please. Another cool thing about this is that you can ‘upgrade’ terms from the folksonomy to the taxonomy!
Hierarchical terms
The terms within the term store can be hierarchical in nature: For instance Regions and countries form a hierarchical structure. When people tag a specific item within SharePoint with Bermuda you can find it under Caribbean or Americas as well.
Management of terms
Each set of terms has an owner. He or she can maintain the terms and other people can give suggestions on synonyms or missing terms directly via the user interface. This makes SharePoint a very user friendly tool for managing metadata.
Autocomplete on terms and tags
When typing a term users get an autocomplete functionality to guide them to already used tags and the predefined taxonomy.
Content type hub
With the term store it is possible to reuse content types across site collections, web applications and even farms. This way policies and workflows can be forced on content across the enterprise which is key in larger organisations. To start using this functionality you need to set up a site collection as your content type hub. In this site collection you’ll maintain your enterprise wide content types. Other sites can use the content types created there.
Other enhancements to metadata usage
Metadata navigation
When browsing libraries or lists users can use key filters and metadata navigation to quickly find the right document within the library. This functionality makes folders look so 2009 ;-)
Facetted Search
Known already from addons like Codeplex’s MOSS Faceted Search or Surfray’s Ontolica Search for SharePoint this feature creates dynamic filters based on your search result which make it easy for end users to refine their search based on metadata properties.
Validation based on Excel based formulas
SharePoint 2010 makes it possible to validate data coming into SharePoint. The user will be instructed on what specific rules a certain property needs to comply to be saved to SharePoint. The formulas describing the rules are based on Excel logic.
That's it for now. Stay tuned for more good SharePoint 2010 stuff!