Chapter 16: Managed Metadata Service Applications

What’s In This Chapter?

  • Configuring managed metadata
  • Metadata navigation
  • Publishing content types

Two powerful features in SharePoint 2010 are metadata and content types. Metadata enables users to quickly and easily classify specific data about documents and list items within SharePoint by using list columns. Content types take metadata to the next level by providing a way to group a collection of metadata with a specific template. These content types can then be associated with many different lists within the site collection. Different content types can reference the same metadata (site columns), and content types can branch into several different levels.

An example of this scenario would be an organization that wants to create a standard document content type with three required metadata columns. By associating this content type with each of the document libraries, the organization provides a way to collect consistent data from many different locations. They could then create an additional department document content type that inherits from the standard document content type, thus allowing each department to add additional fields to the standard document. Using this approach enables an organization to manage the metadata and determine how it is associated with each of the different content types.

This functionality was provided within SharePoint 2007, but it was difficult for an organization to deploy and manage it on a large ...

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