This category contains my posts for a few different, extremely closely tied topics (that’s why I decided to sum it all into one tag). These topics include at least the following ones:

• SharePoint Managed Metadata Service
• SharePoint Term Store (or “termstore”)
• SharePoint Taxonomy
• Managed Metadata Madness (okay, that one I kind of made up!)

These topics revolve around the same thing: using Managed Metadata Service to provide Metadata, in the form of Terms or Tags, to be used in SharePoint, to enrich, describe and annotate different items or elements on your SharePoint sites. This data is usually hierarchical, and surfaces in SharePoint as either taxonomy or folksonomy. It plays a pivotal role in implementing a successful ECM (Enterprise Content Management) strategy – or like it’s now described, Content Services strategy.

The Managed Metadata implies, that you manage the metadata available for your users – and that is accurate. Using SharePoint Term Store, you can create and edit available terms for tagging – see a screenshot below:

These terms can be used for different fields in SharePoint. Below, is an example of what that looks like in Modern SharePoint:

Additionally, it’s possible to set a column to be a “folksonomy” type, when it does contain terms, but they’re not managed – rather, the termset will be open. This way, anyone may add new terms, but the data isn’t necessarily very structured or even hierarchical.

Managed Metadata makes it straightforward to offer your users a reasonably convenient way for tagging their content with correct, or at least descriptive metadata. This, coupled with search configuration and proper information architecture and some black-box-artificial-intelligence in SharePoint Online (with On-prem, you’re stuck without black boxes, but otherwise you have the same options!), will help your content being surfaced to the right users at the right time, and your users to discover the content whenever they want to consume it. This applies to pages, documents and custom lists.