Enabling Taxonomy features on a Site Collection created using "Blank Site" template

When you create a new site collection in SharePoint 2010 using the "Blank Site" or "STS#1" site template, the Taxonomy feature (and possibly other features) will not be activated by default. It appears that Microsoft does not staple any features in the farm with the blank site template. This means, there is no way to activate the Taxonomy features in a blank site using the SharePoint UI because the Taxonomy features are hidden.

To activate the features, run the following stsadm command from the command prompt to enable the feature

stsadm -o activatefeature -id "73EF14B1-13A9-416b-A9B5-ECECA2B0604C" -URL "http://siteurl/sitecollection"

This will enable the "TaxonomyFieldAdded" feature on the team site which should bring the "Term Store Management" link in the site administration section of a site. This will also enable you to add the Managed Metada column to your lists and content types.

On a side note, the following features are related to the taxonomy in SharePoint

TaxonomyFeatureStapler

TaxonomyFieldAdded

TaxonomyTenantAdminStapler

TaxonomyTenantAdmin

TaxonomyTimerJobs

All the above features are "hidden" which means that you can't enable them from the SharePoint UI

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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More Links

http://manish-sharepoint.blogspot.com/2009/10/taxonomy-services-and-managed-metadata.html

http://sharepointsolutions.com/sharepoint-help/blog/index.php/2009/10/using-enterprise-content-types-and-managed-taxonomies-in-sharepoint-2010/

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).