Many of the most promising applications for SharePoint rely on the same combination of features, namely the Term Store and the Managed Metadata Service (MMS). So making the investment required to provide SharePoint stakeholders with the training they need to make use of these features promises a substantial return. Microsoft® presents some of these applications in an article on technet titled Overview of managed metadata service applications in SharePoint Server 2013. As this article points out, “[t]he managed metadata service application makes it possible to use managed metadata and share content types across site collections and web applications.” Any large organization successfully implementing MMS should be able to substantially reduce three costly problems, typically associated with enterprise content and/or document management:
- Duplication of effort
- poor search and retrieval services for documents
- and, finally, limited awareness of content produced by line of business (LoB) silos, and an inability to pull this content into enterprise applications
If content types are not shared, then a considerable amount of effort will, inevitably, be expended on the low value process of recreating the same types from department to department. Even worse, the terms associated with the same content types may differ, substantially, from department to department as the result of a de-centralized effort to manage it. The result of a bloated set of terms for the same content is an ineffective search and retrieval service. The final result? End users pull back on adopting SharePoint. They simply can’t get the results they require from shared document libraries, lists and search.
Management also feels the pain. External content types may not be correctly (or efficiently) implemented. Precious LoB data is not rolled into enterprise analytics. These problems impair the quality of decisions made on courses of action. Important organizational objectives may not be achieved.
Fortunately, SharePoint-Videos offers a set of video training content on Enterprise Content and Document Management for SharePoint 2013. The set is authored by Chris McNulty and titled SharePoint 2013: Managed Metadata and Content Management. This set is available at a cost of $1995.00 for unlimited enterprise viewing. The cost of purchasing this set, together with putting together a plan to increase understanding of MMS and its use across an organization is a small fraction of the cost of operating an organization with the kind of hobbled Enterprise Content and Document Management I’ve described in this post.
If you would like to learn more about how a greater use of MMS will help your organization, please contact us.
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