Ascentium Rocket Labs Working Hard on SharePoint 2010 Managed Metadata Services

We spent the afternoon recently with a super smart team from Microsoft talking about the pros and cons of the Term Store Management tool in SharePoint 2010, and how customers are going to want to use it / change it / adapt it for their own use, not only this year but in the coming years as they migrate from 2007 (or other platforms).

The discussion was exciting, full of possibilities, but also riddled with land mines and ‘gotchas’ that we’ve discovered as we’ve researched the product’s capabilities over the past few months. What stood out from the four hour discussion were these salient points:

• There really is no “OOTB taxonomy”. Although one or more can be imported as a .CSV, for now you’re still going to have to build one within the Term Store from scratch, or build/import one in Excel. No magic here. Sorry. Start saving those taxonomies in Excel now!
• Like SharePoint itself, the Term Store taxonomies are so simple to create and use, it’s kinda scary. What we talked about was “rogue” taxonomies being built by individuals/teams where terms are duplicated across multiple Term Sets with different GUIDs and completely different semantic meanings. Not good. Since there is no way to prevent someone from creating the exact same Term label any number of times
• Governance is going to be more important than ever for SharePoint taxonomies. Want to make sure you’ve disambiguated those terms across multiple Site Collections? Better set up a lightweight taxonomy governance plan, with some executive support and local control by trained taxonomists, or your search/findability is going to suck. Period. Get governance going now.
• Let SharePoint be SharePoint. The idea here is that Microsoft releases a product and then lets the market decide how to use it, based on input from customers and service providers. The SharePoint people in our meeting really want customers and service providers (like Ascentium) to give them feedback on what should be in the next version of SharePoint (yes, thinking is already underway…) and tell them how we want to use Term Store Manager. There are countless possibilities here.

What we’re planning in Ascentium Rocket Labs is to work with our clients on building and implementing taxonomies as part of our interactive marketing projects, but try to push  the Managed Metadata Services capabilities to the limit (we’ve got the technical minds here to do it) and then pull back a bit to make it real. Exciting times for those of us into the technology of taxonomy!

Check out more about Managed Metadata from Microsoft here and here.