Notes SharePoint Blog

Central to most custom Notes applications are keyword fields, which range from simple pop-up or drop-down lists of terms that users can select from (for example, product codes) to lookups in other views and databases (for example, customer numbers). Some Notes solutions even include custom term-management databases where users could centrally manage the terms, codes, and other resource documents used by other Notes applications.

SharePoint 2007 provided two pretty good ways to achieve this functionality: Choice fields allowed users to select from a simple set of choices, and Lookup fields allowed them to select records from a different list within the same site. These options provided much of the required functionality, but in some situations, these features were too simplistic and their scope was too limited.

A powerful new feature of SharePoint 2010 is Managed Metadata (also referred to as Enterprise Metadata or Managed Keywords). You can think of this as the next level beyond Choice fields and Lookup fields. Now SharePoint enables you to manage all the terms that are important to a particular application domain (the keywords, product codes, customer types, document categories, etc.) in a shared term store. SharePoint 2010 includes a complete interface that enables administrators to maintain terms, along with the following cool features:

• Aliases – Different words that mean the same thing
• Translation – Different words in different languages that mean the same thing
• Context – The same word can mean different things in different settings
• Hierarchy – Organization of terms into categories and sub-categories

Some people think of the term store as a corporate taxonomy. But while the term store does attempt to address the needs of a corporate taxonomy, it conjures up images of full-time taxonomy managers and expensive knowledge management consultants trying to establish the perfect set of terms for the enterprise, This may be well beyond the scope of many SharePoint teams. Happily, the Managed Metadata feature in SharePoint 2010 scales very well from simple needs to enterprise knowledge management solutions. For example, you can easily create a simple Managed Metadata field and a term set that is scoped to just one SharePoint site; multiple lists and libraries within that site can reference that same term set just as easily. Later, if you need to, you can scale out to enterprise term sets that span many site collections and can even be replicated between multiple SharePoint farms.

When you use a term store to classify (or, to use the modern buzzword, “tag”) your content, you get additional benefits. Not only are you using a consistent set of terms across multiple applications, but you can use these terms to find content more easily. For one thing, SharePoint search is tuned to work with managed metadata to search across many applications that use the same term sets.

Of special interest to Notes developers is the ability to quickly build drill-down views of your content based on your metadata. This can replace the proliferation of categorized views within many legacy Notes applications that allowed users to navigate their content in various ways. You can also filter views based on your metadata so you can eliminate many views that simply showed different subsets of your data.

In Part 2 we will dig into how the new release 5.3.3 of Notes Migrator for SharePoint will allow to to actually migrate your Notes data to managed metadata fields.