Hi my name is RUSK_510210v2_Draft.

You would never introduce yourself in this manner, so why do your documents?

In the apparent never ending anarchy of naming conventions gone awry and file plans gone mad, there is a simple and pure piece of salvation… metadata.

Metadata is simply “Data about Data”, and when applied to a document it transforms it from a muddled, often questionable name, into a usable piece of information defined by its qualities. These qualities could include the author, created date, document type, and department. With these descriptors in place you have clearly identified a document, separate from its file name. I am in no way proposing that file names are not important, but when you try to find a document such as “RUSK_510210v2_Draft” it is far easier to locate it by searching via its metadata such as “document type” and “created date”.

Within SharePoint, metadata is also called a site column. This metadata (column) can be in varying formats including, but not limited to; text, number, choice, lookup, currency, date and time, and managed metadata.

Sample Site Column Information Options

Managed Metadata is a special field that references the Term Store where the SharePoint Taxonomy is stored and managed. More information regarding the SharePoint Taxonomy can be found in this blog post, but the main advantage of using the Managed Metadata field is that since a taxonomy is centrally managed, a metadata field will be populated with pre-determined terms… a huge improvement over a simple Lookup Field or Choice List.

Once you have determined what metadata is relevant for your documents and created Content Types for these documents, you will be able to store documents via SharePoint’s Content Organizer, manage them with Workflows, and find them via multiple options such as metadata filters and FAST search.

There is no limit to the metadata you can create, but it is important to bear in mind that is must be relevant and requiring users to fill in too many metadata fields is poor usability. A balance must be achieved between what is core to the document’s description and how much time/information users are willing to commit.

Print PDF