Metadata and its Effective use in SharePoint Development
Since its launch SharePoint has been used by many organizations all over the world, mainly to manage various documents and collaboration. If your business data is small, then storing, managing and discovering them won’t be a troublesome task. But as your data grows, trouble begins and with tons of data and documents managing the hierarchy levels of folders and having proper metadata attached to them is important else searching and finding them is a nightmare. So, for every content management system, metadata plays a chief role so that the content can be effectively categorized and organized wherever needed. This would help the users to filter, sort as well as group the content which makes the management process easier.
Some Basics of Metadata in SharePoint Development
As a SharePoint website user would probably encounter metadata every day, but what is this metadata? Metadata is basically an attribute of an object and it equals attributes. It can be used in many fields and offers information about information which can be of many kinds like a location, a date or a catalog item. Whenever you use SharePoint products, you can easily manage the metadata centrally and organize them in the way that makes sense in your business, which makes it easier to find what you want.
What is Managed Metadata?
Managed metadata is a hierarchical collection of centrally managed terms that the users can define and used by the SharePoint developers as attributes for items. When you use them, you can easily prepare a complete list of metadata keywords that are suitable for your business. They can be created centrally either in the Central Administration or the site collection based on the preference so that the metadata can be used in any level for any document.
If you have created the list of metadata at Central Admin level, then it would be available for any site collection and in case it is created at the site collection level, then it would be available only at that particular site collection. You can easily organize the metadata in the way that helps your business and makes it easier to easily retrieve the documents any time you are in need.
Also Read: Setting Up Internal Communications Using SharePoint
Some Benefits of Using Managed Metadata with SharePoint Development
The managed metadata features of SharePoint development allow you to control how the users can add metadata to the content and who can control them. You can limit the enterprise keywords to a list by configuring the keywords that are set as closed.
Flexibility:
The term store administer can easily access the term sets and terms any time and they can also create new terms based on business metadata or even update the existing terms that automatically reflect wherever the updated term or term set is used. If your site is multilingual, then you can also mention the multilingual labels for individual terms.
Quick Search:
With managed metadata in SharePoint website development, you can easily improve the file discovery process. Defining the metadata globally and then reusing them across the site allows you to quickly search the content that you need. You can also add the metadata as refiners in your SharePoint search results page and further filter and refine it based on the metadata.
Easy Navigation:
Managed metadata is used for easy website navigation, libraries navigation and lists. It is by using metadata navigation that we can easily filter the list and libraries very quickly. Without it, most of the information of your business will become unstructured. Adding metadata helps you to find, organize and gain complete insights from your documents or files.
Also Read: Tips to Create Multilingual Websites in SharePoint