Configuring Managed Metadata Services (MMS) In SharePoint 2010

Metadata Management is very one of the critical aspects of any organization. By managing its metadata, consistency of the information used across the various units and teams in an organization could be enhanced, thus facilitating the information to be more locatable.

Introduction
 
Metadata is additional information about other data/artifact. Metadata is used to describe that artifact. This metadata resides outside of the artifact. E.g. Author, Organization, Language, technology to which that artifact is written by or belongs to, and type of the document like white paper, training material, check list, etc. These are additional information about the artifact but reside outside of the artifact and tell more about the artifact.
 
The following points will cover in this document:
 
1) In what way the metadata can be managed?
2)Real-world techniques for metadata implementation.

Problem with the existing systems
 

1. Metadata inconsistency:
    
    If the metadata is not standardized, then there is a possibility of inconsistent way of tagging data. For example, if an application to fill in the field called Location, one person might fill as INDIA, second as ASIA, third person as BHARATH. When somebody tries to get all documents belonging to the location INDIA, he may not get the right set of documents.
    
2. Metadata hierarchy maintenance:
    
   For example, End user want to tag one document to the test1 project in banking domain of xyz organization, so user can get the document in result set with hierarchy; it is not possible in existing systems.
      
3. Free text Metadata:
    
   1) Existing system allows free text without proper governance; it will make difficulty in search and comparing data or content.
   2) In SharePoint Server 2010 Search relevance is improved as user inputs also get crawled and indexed while adding metadata tags, in current system it’s not provided.  
        
    
4. Grouping Metadata:
    
   Metadata will be grouped to sub units.
   Grouping metadata will allow managing metadata differently for different sub units,
   Example:  One organization having Sales department and it is connected with both Company Global store and Purchase department So, while searching for a particular term, all files associated with that term(both Company Global store and Purchase department) are retrieved from the multiple site collections across the web applications.
    
    
5. Synonyms Terms:
    
   Synonyms are used to get terms in search results in different way of wording,
   For Example: SharePoint Services, Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, SharePoint Services 4.0, Windows SharePoint Services 4.0 all these are different search keywords are used to refer to the same term.
    
6. Lack of Search Administration Reports:
    
   In SharePoint server 2010 there is a provision for an administrator to actually view a graphical representation of the searched keywords against the time taken for its retrieval.
    
   In MOSS 2007 there is a limitation of site collection boundary, In brief site columns are specific to the site collection, so if any user want to share same columns (metadata and taxonomy) across the multiple site collection the he have to create same columns in each site collection. So it is very difficult when user need to update any column (metadata and taxonomy), for this user need to update the columns in all the site collections.
     To overcome such challenges; SharePoint 2010 has been bundled with a new important feature called Enterprise Metadata Management (EMM). EMM is a key building block in Enterprise Content Management and will offer enterprise, management of metadata terms and content types for the content management systems. This will permit the sharing of the metadata taxonomies and terms in organizations across its multiple SharePoint websites and site collections.
   In MOSS 2007 there is a limitation of site collection boundary, In brief site columns are specific to the site collection, so if any user want to share same columns (metadata and taxonomy) across the multiple site collection the he have to create same columns in each site collection. So it is very difficult when user need to update any column (metadata and taxonomy), for this user need to update the columns in all the site collections.
    
   To overcome such challenges; SharePoint 2010 has been bundled with a new important feature called Enterprise Metadata Management (EMM). EMM is a key building block in Enterprise Content Management and will offer enterprise, management of metadata terms and content types for the content management systems. This will permit the sharing of the metadata taxonomies and terms in organizations across its multiple SharePoint websites and site collections.
      
      
     Metadata in SharePoint 2010 is broadly classified into two types.

 

 
 
 

1. Governance Driven (Taxonomy):
    
   In this terms are pre-defined by an administrator and are centrally governed. We can say these terms are Managed Terms. A controlled term can only be created by those with appropriate permissions. Managed terms can be structured into a hierarchy and can be selected by the users out of the new ‘Managed Metadata’ column type. When a metadata column of this type is defined, the user will be permitted to decide the metadata from the collection of pre-defined managed terms.
    
    
2. User Driven (Folksonomy):
   In this users specific to SharePoint 2010 items is going to add words or phrases we can say these terms are Managed Keywords. By default the managed keyword column is present. User-generated keywords (tags) are kept in list keyword set, this is a non-hierarchical.
    
    Case Study
    
   Below is the example of an organizational instance, where a user needs to enter in a field called “Location” and the possible keywords are already available from centrally governed keyword thus enabling classification and search easier.
     i)             Create a Group (term) and Term Sets in the Taxonomy term store
   Creating a Group (term) and Term Sets in the Taxonomy term store under the Managed Metadata Service as below:
    
   Group name:  TCS
   Term Sets:  Locations and Unit 
    
   So, we here are initiating the creation of a hierarchy level.
    
   See the below image:
    

          
            


ii)Create child terms for each term

By creating child terms, metadata across the organizational applications is consistent.
i) Click on down arrow beside above created Term (Group).                    


             

ii) Create two child items like below, Location and Units       
  

                      
iii)Create Synonyms for each term
It will help to improve search relevance as their inputs also get crawled and indexed thus achieving greater scope for end users to retrieve the documents with ease.
i)Creating a term under child:


        

 ii)Creating term India under location




 
 
iii)Creating Synonyms for term India

 
 
   
     
 
iv) Defining metadata column as a metadata column in a list
Defining metadata column as a metadata column in a list(Go to any doc library and click on create column)




v)Assigning the right node from taxonomy
Assigining the right node from taxonomy to the metadata column.
i)Select the Managed Metadata option
ii)Assign the node
iii)Click on Ok

 


vi)End user view of metadata column


i) End user view of metadata column    
       

 


 
ii) Searching through Synonym, after entering ‘hi’ it is showing India in search result, as we given ‘Hindustan’ as the Synonym in List.
 

 
 
 
 
iii)On Click on picker to select it will opens the follwing window:



iv) After selecting the term:

 
 
 

References
i)http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee424403.aspx  
ii) http://sharepointgeorge.com/2010/configuring-managed-metadata-service-application-sharepoint-2010-part1/