Sharepoint Taxonomy and Metadata

In my last post, I wrote about some of the decisions that must be made when setting up a SharePoint taxonomy plan. But this didn't tell the whole story. Once sites and subsites are planned out, what about the content within them? The content will reside in list or document libraries (or some glorified version of either of these). Most people are familar with using a hierarchy of folders. This is how people have stored information on PCs for years. And while there is certainly something to be said for using that method in SharePoint -- familiarity, comfortability, and yes, even performance in some cases -- this isn't always the best way.

By incorporating metadata fields in your lists and libraries, along with views, which will allow you to slice-and-dice the mass of content, you can more easily manage your information. If you wanted to change your data structure and needed to move documents from folder A to folder B, for example, this may be needlessly difficult and time consuming. Now I know you can choose "Open in Windows Explorer" and copy-paste from source to destination, but this approach is notorious for bogging down the system and taking way too much time. So why not simply leave the documents where they are, and just tag each document (via metadata) with the appropriate keywords? With this method, it's as simple as changing the tag info to reflect the new information. Now instead of moving geography-based information from the "Northeast" folder to the "Southeast" folder, you just change the "Location" metadata field from "Northeast" to "Southeast". You can set up views based on the geographical region to visually separate the data. Don't forget, if you have multiple document libraries or lists which would (or could) have a geographic region as a metadata field, you can use a Site Column for that. No need to store that separately in each library or list.

Sharepoint Taxonomy and Structure

Many people have asked me how to implement a taxonomy plan for a SharePoint site. The key really lies in how the team will be using the information. How many lists or libraries should you have? How many subsites should you have? Historically, companies have been function-centric entities, where everyone in Human Resources shared certain information, everyone in Sales shared other information, and so on. But one thing to consider is how much of this HR information is available to the Sales department, or even to the company as a whole, and vice versa. As an alternative to function-centric, companies may be aligned more by geographic location, or by product, etc. This will be the driving factor in the initial taxonomy plan. How is information shared and disseminated? As you answer these questions, you must always keep security and permissions access in the back of your mind. Fortunately, SharePoint 2007 offers a very flexible system in which to enable access to certain people or groups of people.