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User-generated keyword tags is a cool new feature in SharePoint 2010, but how are these terms going to be managed across the enterprise?

The Situation

In SharePoint 2010, there are two main ways to manage metadata: managed terms and enterprise keywords. Managed terms are ones that have been created by experienced content owners or the company taxonomist, and are arranged into a traditional hierarchy. Enterprise keywords are the ones that users create on their own to tag their documents when they’re uploading them into Document Libraries, for example. Such tagging by non-experts is referred to as creating a folksonomy, or a more informal taxonomy.

Before setting up your SharePoint 2010 environment to allow site users to create enterprise keywords, it is important to understand a few key things about how this feature works.

In the example below, a user is uploading a document called “Governance Overview – Key Benefits.docx”. You can see that Enterprise Keywords has been enabled for this Document Library. This means that users can add their own tags to the document.

The user wants to add the tag “value” so she enters the term and clicks “Save”. The term “value” is now added to the Enterprise Keywords Term Set in the System Term Group of the Managed Metadata Service.

 Once the term has been entered by the user as an Enterprise Keyword, it appears in the Keywords term set as a label. Other users can now use the tag when they’re tagging other documents throughout the SharePoint environment, where Enterprise Keywords have been enabled.

The Problem

Using enterprise keywords is cool. It allows users to feel engaged with the system, and can add value (no pun) to documents, meaning easier findability for other users. But with every benefit, there can be a drawback.

When terms are in the Enterprise Keywords term set, they are not controlled nor are they in any kind of hierarchy. Enterprise Keywords appear as a simple flat list of terms.  They can also be moved to another term set, if appropriate.

Once you move the enterprise keyword to a specific term set, it is available to all the document libraries just as it was when it was in the Keywords term set. In the view below, the term “value” has been moved to the “Brand” Term Set under the Corporate Branding Term Group.

 When you try to tag another document with that same term, the type-ahead will show you its new hierarchy:

This is a fantastic feature! Users can create terms in Enterprise Keywords and content owners or taxonomists can scour the list for new terms to add to their Term Sets. Wonderful!

Or not. The only problem with moving the enterprise keyword from Keywords to a particular term set is that the meaning of the term, such as “value”, when the user first created it may be different from that of the documents of another user, who may have already used the term “value” on a document prior to the term being moved to “Brand”.

For instance, if I created the keyword “value” and applied it to a lot of documents about governance, and you come along as a taxonomist for Corp Comm and moved the term to “brand”, my documents—about governance—are no longer tagged correctly. It’s also important to note that Enterprise Keywords are available across the entire enterprise, so tagging can occur across multiple business units without anyone knowing how/where the tags were applied.

It is also important to remember that if there are a large number of Enterprise Keywords that are generated, it could quickly turn into a large, unwieldy, and non-hierarchical list of terms if you don’t move them to specific term sets.

Another Issue

What if the enterprise keyword is deleted from the term set it was in? If you go back to the document that you tagged, the word is still there, colored red and underlined with a dashed line, but you are unable to click on it or gather any information from it.

All of these problems with the enterprise keywords go back to the issues that we have identified in previous Rocket Lab posts here and here about the lack of consistency of terms in SharePoint 2010. If you are building out a complex taxonomy or tagging items in a large document library, the only way Term Store Management allows you to ensure the consistency of your term is to make it unavailable for tagging, which defeats the purpose.

Since there does not seem to be a way to ensure consistency of terms in SharePoint 2010, the only real solution to this problem is to develop a strong taxonomy governance program. That’s where Ascentium can help your company develop the kind of taxonomy governance structure that you will need.  More about this in later posts. Thanks for reading.

Brian Le Blanc, a taxonomist intern at Ascentium, has been doing research into the capabilities of Term Store Management and assisted with creating this post.