In an article on MSDN titled Creating and Migrating Taxonomies Using the Term Store Management Tool, Stakeholders in a plan to craft SharePoint 2010 or 2013 into an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) tool can learn how to build custom taxonomies with Term Sets. As noted in this article: “Taxonomies are created as term sets that contain multiple terms. Terms may have additional child terms with up to seven levels of nesting.” (quoted from an article on MSDN. A link to this article has been provided earlier in this paragraph).
Chris McNulty touches on some of the same subject matter in a video tutorial included in his set, SharePoint 2013: Managed Metadata and Content Management DVD. The title of the video on this topic is “Using Managed Metadata Service Taxonomy in SharePoint 2013″.
In this short presentation of nearly 4 mins in length, Chris demonstrates the methods by which SharePoint 2013 users can add tags to specific pieces of content. Each of these tags is added to the SharePoint 2013 repository of information about content. Chris demonstrates how users can accelerate the process of tagging content by typing a couple of letters into the MMS tool and allowing the system to suggest auto complete options.
The point of using MMS in this way, as Chris makes clear at the start of the video, SharePoint users ” . . . can always define a Term Set as a possible field to attach to a library”. Given the depth of dependencies possible for Term Sets, the ramifications of Chris’ comment are very far-reaching. In other words, a custom taxonomy can be associated with specific SharePoint libraries via a unique field. This capability an be successfully used to supercharge a SharePoint governance effort, by directly associating content assets with respective aspects of a business, or even an organization.
Once content is structured to conform to the unique share of a business, or even an organization, the real benefits of ECM should become apparent. If your organization would like to use SharePoint in an ECM implementation, we’d like to hear from you. Please contact us to discuss your plans.
© Rehmani Consulting, Inc. & Ira Michael Blonder, 2013 All Rights Reserved