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/

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.

Reference: http://www.andrewconnell.com/blog/archive/2009/10/19/part-1-improvements-to-the-core-sharepoint-platform.aspx

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

http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2009/10/19/sharepoint-2010.aspx

Updating SPGroup owner

Hi

To update the owner of the group, you simply set the Owner property of the SPGroup object to a SPMember (which can be a SPUser or an SPGroup).

SPGroup spGroup = currentWeb.SiteGroups["GroupName"];

spGroup1.Owner = spGroup2;

sp.Group1.Update();

I was trying to update the owner of the SharePoint group through the API using the code above, but unfortunately that did not work.

So i did what most of the developers do, google it (i mean bing it). However i didn't find an answer to my question, so i tried to change my code and debug it until i found the solution.

For some reason, i had to get the reference to the SharePoint group from the root web of the site collection, rather than getting it from the web SiteGroups property.

so to fix the problem, i changed the above code to:

SPGroup spGroup = currentWeb.Site.RootWeb.SiteGroups["GroupName"];

spGroup1.Owner = spGroup2;

sp.Group1.Update();

I hope you will find this useful.

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