SharePoint 2010 Managed Metadata – Creating and Managing Term Set Group

The Managed metadata service application is a welcome addition to SharePoint 2010.The Managed Metadata’s  primary purpose is to provide you with a central location to store metadata (commonly defined as data about data) that can be utilized throughout any site within your SharePoint farm.  This is definitely one step ahead of what we referred to as Content Types and Site Columns in SharePoint 2007.
Managed metadata service application allows us to formalize our Taxonomy or metadata which will be utilized across the entire farm.

What is Managed Metadata?

Managed Metadata is a hierarchical collection of centrally managed terms that you can define and use to label and categorize content on SharePoint sites. It helps you classify information consistently across site collections and makes content search easier and faster.

Content Type vs Managed Metadata

Term sets from Managed Meta data is one of the types of Meta data you can add to your content types, just like a choice list or a date field.

With managed Meta data you can define hierarchies of highly managed Meta data terms (taxonomies) or you can use the term set as a folksonomy or social tagging where the terms typically are managed by the contributors that can add new terms to the list.

SharePoint 2010 Managed Metadata Terminology:

1. Term Store : This is the database in which our managed metadata is stored in.
2. Term : An individual item within a set of similar items. In SharePoint 2010, it could either be a managed term or an enterprise keyword.
3. Term Set : A group of related terms. There are two types of term set based on their availability across all sites.( Managed Terms” and “Enterprise Keywords”)The term set that is created locally at a site collection that can’t be shared among other sites is call local term set.
4. Term Set Group : A group of term sets that share common security requirements.
5. “Managed terms, commonly referred to as “Taxonomy” are predefined words or phrases that can only be created by users with the appropriate permissions.  We can refer to this special group of users as “Metadata Content Managers”. A hierarchical classification of words, labels, or terms that are organized into groups based on similar attributes. 
6. “Enterprise keywords, commonly referred to as “Folksonomy” are words or phrases that have been added by the end user.  A tagging system that results when multiple site users collaboratively apply words, labels, or terms to content on a site

Setup the Managed Metadata Service

To setup our Managed Metadata Service, navigate to Central Administration / Application Management / Manage Service Applications.

Click New and select “Managed Metadata Service”

Enter the follow details;

Name: Managed Metadata Service

Database Server: <server_name>

Database Name: Managed Metadata DB

I will utilize the sp_farm account for the Application Pool Identity

Click Create.

Lastly, navigate to Central Administration / System Settings / Manage services on server and start the Managed Metadata Web Service.

Managing metadata on a SharePoint site

Step1: Click Site Actions, from the drop-down menu, click Site Settings

Step2: Under Site Administration, click Term store management

Step 3: In the Taxonomy Term Store, we already have Managed Metadata Service set up, right click Managed Metadata Service, we can create a new Term Set Group by clicking New Group

Step 4: Edit the Term Set Group properties

·         Name

·         Description

·         Group manager: user can manage contributors and edit terms

·         Contributor: user can edit term and term hierarchies

 

Step 5: Right click New Group Demo, which is the new Term Set Group we just created. We can choose now to delete this group, create a new Term Set in the group or Import Term Set. Click Import Term Set, we will show you how to import term set in the demo:

Step 6: (Optional) This step is to show you where to find a sample Term Set import file which is a CSV file that can be edited in Excel. Click on the Managed Metadata Service, under properties, click on the hyperlink to open the sample import file:

Here’s how the sample term set file looks, there could be up to 7 levels. In this example, each term is unique, but in real life, there could be multiple states in the same country:

Second list shows how a real life term set hierarchy look like:

Step 7: Browse to the term set CSV file you want to import, click OK:

The new Term Set Political Geography is now imported to the Term Set Group:

Step 8: You can expand the Term Sets by click on it to view the individual terms and hierarchies. Right click any term, you can choose any of the actions from the drop-down list to Create New Term, Copy Term, Delete Term, and etc.

Step 9: Right click a term under which you need to create terms, and then click Create Term. For example, right click Political Entity 1, then click Create Term, you will be able to add country terms in Political Entity 1. Press Enter to add another country term

Step10: Click on any of the items on the Taxonomy Term Store pane on the left hand side to edit the item properties. Here’s a list of Term Set properties you can edit:

·         Term Set Name

·         Description

·         Owner

·         Contact: Enter an email address for receiving suggestions and feedback; suggestion feature would be disabled if left blank

·         Stakeholders: users and users groups to be notified when the term set went through major changes 

·         Submission Policy:users can add terms from a tagging application if this is left open.    Note: If you intend to keep a standardized taxonomy, leave this option closed so that end users cannot add Terms to the Term Set 

·         Available for tagging: the term set will not be available to be used by end users if unchecked  

You’ve just created a new Term Set Group, imported a Term Set to the Term Set Group, added Terms to the Term Set and edited the properties of these items!

Adding Managed Metadata to a SharePoint List or Library

Let’s navigate to a List in which we would like to add our Managed Metadata as a column.  Navigate to the List or Library in question and click on List under List Tools in the Ribbon and then click on Create Column.

Enter a name for your Column.  In my example I will call it State as I will be using the State Term Set .

Set your “Display format” so it either displays just the term label or the entire path.

Under Term Set Settings, select your Term Set. You can also utilize the search facility in the event you have a large number of Term Sets.

Finally select whether you want to Allow Fill-in, which is only available if your Term Set was set to allow it. This is handled by the Submission Policy set to Open.

 

Click OK once done.

I will now proceed to add a new item in my fairly bland Custom List via Add new item.

 

One thing to note is the “Send Feedback” link, which is visible if you click on the browse button beside your metadata field.  This allows users to provide feedback if an email address was specified under “Contact” in the properties of the Term via the Term Store Management Tool.