SharePoint 2010: exploring the managed metadata service application

I’m going to explore with you in a new post series the exciting managed metadata service application that was introduced with the new version of SharePoint 2010 Standard and Enterprise.

Metadata is used to describe the items (document, calendar event, announcement, etc.) you are adding into SharePoint. You can extend an items description with metadata by creating new list or document library columns (attributes). This system abstraction lets you create any type of information that you are interested in.

The managed metadata service application in SharePoint 2010 can be used to collect terms farm wide and share them with one or more web applications. These terms can be controlled centrally by a small number of persons (taxonomy) or opened to more users (folksonomy). These term definitions (taxonomy or folksonomy terms) are shared across your web applications that are consuming the managed metadata service application in form of managed metadata columns and the tags features provided by the user profile service application.

Finally, the managed metadata service application provides you a new feature that permits to define enterprise wide content types. In SharePoint 2007 content types were bound to site collections. Now, you can define farm wide content types that are shared across multiple site collections and web applications. This is accomplished with the content type hub features.

The next posts that I’m going to write for this post series are (the links to this posts will be updated in the next weeks):

• How do I create a new managed metadata service application?
• Setting up a managed metadata service application to server one or more web applications
• How is the managed metadata term store organized?
• Creating the term store example with the term store management tool
• How do I manage my taxonomy in the term store management tool?
• Assigning a managed term set to a custom column
• How do I work with the Content Type Hub feature of the managed metadata service application?

If you are interested in getting more information about managed metadata, just start on digging deeper into this TechNet link.

 

Hope this helps,

Patrick