Friday, October 30, 2009

Taxonomy Services, Managed Metadata, and Managed keywords

SharePoint 2010 comes with a new services that provides the functionality to tag content types with metadata and keywords. I will be posting more information about how to manage taxonomies within SharePoint 2010 in upcoming posts, for now, i will explain some keywords that we will see a lot in SharePoint 2010.

Taxonomy is a hierarchal tree of Values
Term Store is a DB containing different taxonomies
Term Set is a section in the term store that contains individual terms.
Term is a node in the taxonomy tree with an ID and many text labels
Tagging is the act of linking an item to a node or multiple nodes in the taxonomy tree.
Groups are security boundaries within the term store and above the term set.
Keywords are the actual links (reference) to a node in the taxonomy tree.
Managed Metadata Column is a new column type that can be added to content types
Managed Keyword Column is a new column type that can be added to any content type

At this point, i'm not sure what is the difference between the Managed keywords, and Managed Metadata.

These can be managed in SharePoint 2010 using the Term Management Tool. You will find this in Central Administration --> Manage Service Applications. The tool will allow administrators to publish, Terms, Term Sets, and importing them.

It is possible to tag documents within a desktop Rich Client such as MS Office Word.

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Tuesday, October 20, 2009

SharePoint 2010 UI Improvements

SharePoint 2010 has a lot of improvements in the UI which impacts the usability of the WCM in SharePoint in a positive way.

Some of the enhancements are:

  • Cleaner Markup: The Microsoft SharePoint Foundation (MSF) controls are no longer table based, and all the CSS classes were re-factored and cleaned up.
  • SharePoint 2010 is XHTML compliant, and also supports WCAG 2.0.
  • Reduced Postbacks / Page refreshes.
  • Server Ribbon, which copies the functionality of the ribbon in Office applications.

Metadata in SharePoint 2010

SharePoint 2010 comes with a huge taxonomy API, put into the Microsoft.Taxonomy.dll assembly.
With SP 2010, it is possible to tag items and pages with keywords from a term store, which then can be leveraged through the search solutions, or navigation solutions.

This will provide SharePoint with another method to visualize the data, together with the folder structure (i.e. SPSites, SPWeb, SPList approach).


SharePoint 2010 Developers Center


The SharePoint 2010 Developer Center is now live on MSDN. The site contains useful learning modules about SharePoint 2010. The site includes modules for getting started developing in SharePoint 2010.






Welcome to SharePoint 2010

Beta version of SharePoint 2010 will be released in November as announced by Steve Ballmer and Jeff Teper today at the SharePoint 2009 Conference.


The new version of SharePoint Office Server has a lot of new enhancements in regards to content management and collaboration. Some of the interesting new features are:
  • Social Feedback and Organization
  • Enterprise Metadata
  • Web Publishing including Digital Asset Management
  • Governance and Records Management
  • Development on Windows 7
and many more


For more details about SharePoint 2010, visit the SharePoint Team blog