SharePoint 2010 Taxonomy Tool Needs Some Help

In a recent post here, some members of the Rocket Labs team were talking about how to maintain the consistency of a taxonomy within SharePoint 2010 Term Store Management. It looks like the best way to do this might be to export the taxonomies out of Term Store, work on them in a more flexible tool, and to import them back in. This functionality does not exist in SharePoint 2010 today.

Fortunately, we’ve got some Rocket Labs ‘scientists’ at Ascentium looking into this.  And we think we have a solution.

The Problem:

The Term Store Management interface can get unwieldy when building out taxonomies, thus making it more difficult to make changes and updates. For example, Term Store Management limits navigation within the taxonomy to the left side pane. Once there are more than about 20 terms in a term set, clickable arrows appear at the top and bottom, limiting the view to 10 terms at a time. At the end of the list, there is no way to use the arrow to cycle through to the beginning. We show below a screen grab (see Figure 1 below) of what this means. If the terms sets are numbered sequentially, they will be placedby default in order by the arrows according to the number on the left, so, for instance there will be “HR Policy 1” followed by “HR Policy 10,” not “HR Policy 2.”

Figure 1: Scrolling through terms can be difficult

You can solve this by going into the Custom Sort section and changing from the default setting of "use default sort order of current language" to "use custom sort order." You then have to manually place each term in the order you intended, which is a very tedious and time-consuming process (see Figure 2 below).  Given all of these constraints, it’s hard to keep track of things such as term reuse within a taxonomy.

 Figure 2: Modifying with a sort order can be tedious

Bottom line: The Term Store Management capability in SharePoint 2010 needs some help.

One Solution:

Ascentium technologists Corby Hudnall and Ramon Tristani have been looking into ways to import and export taxonomies from SharePoint 2010. Corby created a solution whereby a user can export taxonomies from Term Store Management in CSV format. He also recommended that “the next logical step would be to look at a richer import and export format, most likely based on XML.” You can read Corby’s post here.

The next step was taken by Ramon, who has created a SharePoint 2010 Taxonomy import utility, which “allows taxonomy authors to define complete taxonomies in XML format instead of manual creation via SharePoint Term Store Management or CSV files” and subsequently facilitates deployment back into SharePoint 2010 term store. The taxonomist would then have a library independent of SharePoint where they could read, search, merge, backup, import, export, and edit local or remote taxonomies. He has posted the preliminary code to Codeplex here.

Given the current interface constraints, creating a system where a taxonomist could work in XML and then export their taxonomy back into Term Store Management sounds like a game-changing idea. For taxonomists who are feeling constrained by the current interface, it is great to hear that Ramon and Corby are working on solutions, but they are currently only command line tools. The next step would be to create a user interface that would incorporate their ideas and build upon the existing functionality of Term Store Manager.

Ascentium Rocket Labs is researching that now. More to come soon.