Defining, Building a SharePoint Metadata Strategy

By David Roe (@druadh20) Jun 9, 2011

While the buzz and excitement around the launch of SharePoint 2010 is now firmly in the past, the reality of working with it is now becoming a daily problem. We say problem in the sense that there is still a very steep learning curve for many enterprises and users before the full capabilities can be released. Metadata in SharePoint 2010 is a good case in question.

While this not the first time we have visited this subject, and undoubtedly it will not be the last, a recent paper by Christian Buckley, director of product evangelism for Axceler (news, site), on developing a metadata strategy for SharePoint 2010 is a good starting point.

SharePoint cannot solve all your business problems — after all, it’s just a tool — but an effective metadata strategy will go a long way to releasing the potential of SharePoint 2010, which has been outlined in many different places.

The Role of Metadata, Taxonomy

Many companies, Buckley argues, still don’t get the importance of having a clearly defined metadata strategy and goals.

While there are many administration and user issues that enterprises need to understand, behind many of them is metadata and keyword taxonomies that will have a significant impact on the success of a SharePoint 2010 deployment.

Many of the popular features, for example, such as adding documents to libraries, entering and participating in enterprise workflows or the new social search features all depend on effective metadata.

In fact, he argues, the number one reason why SharePoint deployments fail to capture the attention of the targeted user group, is because ineffective metadata does not enable many of the functions that users want.

Defining Business Goals

Unsurprisingly, the starting point behind all this is defining and understanding business goals. It would seem that, given the number of times this has come up even in the past week with business processes or the deployment of enterprise collaboration tools, a lot of enterprises are not really doing this.

Questions like what your enterprise is trying to accomplish need to be answered first, and then whether SharePoint will actually be able to realize those goals, even in an ideal world, also needs to be considered.

Without this kind of understanding, it will not be possible to outline the scope, scale and functionality of what is to be built. It provides, in fact, your first step to developing effective metadata.

Understanding Your Metadata Strategy

So why is a metadata strategy so important? The first thing to remember, Buckley says, is that it provides more than just search terms for uploaded content. It is the power behind search, making the social media functionality work through contextual relationships.

Without it, users will not be able to find the content they are looking for, or discover where it is located — remembering that all content should have metadata — and if users can’t find the content they need when they need it, the deployment will be a failure.