Improved Managed Metadata Service in SharePoint 2013. What’s new?

Hello,
Today I want to talk about Managed Metadata service in SharePoint 2013. But first I want to clarify a couple of terms for you. As you probably know, metadata is information about information. And metadata management is the way to organize and maintain a company’s information for documents, records, etc. So, Managed Metadata is helping users easily structure and tag content, and provide end-users with the ability to search required information faster.

Since Managed Metadata has been introduced in SharePoint 2010, it has helped users to easily tag and structure content. Like most of its features, SharePoint 2013 has improved the basic Managed Metadata features.Managing metadata effectively requires careful thought and planning. Think about the kinds of information that you want to manage; the content of lists and libraries, and think about the way that the information is used in the organization. You can create sets of metadata terms for different kinds of information.

Did you know that in SharePoint 2013 you can use the Managed Metadata service to improve your site navigation structure? You do not need to have any additional programming skills to produce auto-generated pages based on the taxonomy hierarchy. Instead of driving default URLs in a SharePoint 2013 site (like Library/forms/NewForm.aspx) you can easily read URLs from the Managed Metadata Term Store. As a result you will get an intuitive site with user-friendly and search engine-friendly URLs.

Some Managed Metadata features are very common; filtering list, views based hierarchy, search and SEO optimization. SharePoint 2013 features can deliver additional features like the following.

Better list view filtering. You can do improved filtering, displaying all the tagging with a value or a child of this value.

Better navigation. The Managed Metadata navigation feature allows you to navigate through libraries using hierarchies other than the folder hierarchy.

Better routing. Document routing can direct your content based on the metadata applied to it.

Better file searching. If you can’t remember exactly where your document is stored in a large library, you can use the taxonomy field to filter the open dialog display.

Better sociality. All social properties are sourced from the taxonomy system, so you do not need do additional social tagging.

There is a couple of main features which have been improved in SharePoint 2013 Managed Metadata service.

• Pinned Terms. Terms can be reused in the Term Store, so you do not need create duplicates of terms.
• Datasheet View. In SharePoint 2013, Managed Metadata columns support the Datasheet View, so you can use three additional options: replace all selected values with required terms, add terms to all selected fields, and remove terms from all selected fields.

There are the two most used features in the new SharePoint 2013 Managed Metadata service, but not all of them. You can check it all for yourself after purchasing a hosted SharePoint 2013 service from PlexHosted.

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