SharePoint Taxonomy

What is Taxonomy?

Taxonomy is the practice and science of classification. The word finds its roots in the Greek τάξις, taxis (meaning 'order', 'arrangement') and νόμος, nomos ('law' or 'science'). It is the science of classification according to a pre-determined system, with the resulting catalog used to provide a conceptual framework for discussion, analysis, or information retrieval.

What is SharePoint Taxonomy?

In context of SharePoint taxonomy, we usually get many questions related to SharePoint website. Some of them I have listed below:

1. What type of content does the site contain?

2. Who can view the site?

3. Who can manage the site?

4. Who can publish content to the site?

5. What is the site’s URL?

6. How much space can the site consume?

7. What does the site look like?

8. How long should the site remain active?

All these questions are successfully answered by creating SharePoint Taxonomy.

SharePoint Taxonomy basically deals with data (aka. metadata) as well as the policies, workflows, permissions, etc.

Following is the sample SharePoint Taxonomy metadata:

With the exponential growth of implementations worldwide, come greater challenges and opportunities for improving knowledge management and information access within the enterprise. The need for consistent organizing principles across enterprise information is of ever increasing importance and, when done correctly, can result in leaps and bounds in employee productivity.

Before we get to any of the details however, let’s remind ourselves that the purpose of building and maintaining taxonomies is to improve the find ability of information by:

-Defining preferred terms along with their synonyms and variants;

-Establishing equivalent, hierarchical, associative or custom relationships between those terms;

-Increasing the effectiveness of site navigation; and

-Enhancing enterprise search by leveraging functionality such as faceted navigation.

The first and cost effective approach is to leverage features and functionality inherently part of the platform itself. Doing so means the implementation of sharepoint taxonomy is done through a combination of site content types, column definitions and custom lists.

A typical implementation of taxonomy might look something like this: As an administrator you navigate to the root or site collection settings and do the following:

1. Define SharePoint Taxonomy Metadata – Create custom site lists to be used for the management of metadata attributes you want to surface as controlled vocabularies for your site users.

2. Define Site Columns – Create new site columns that get their information from the custom lists created above via lookup fields.

3. Define Content Types – Create new site content types and add the appropriate site columns as required.

4. Allow the Management of Content Types – Enable the management of content types on site lists and libraries that require these consistent organizing principles.

We should have a sample check-list of items of what needs to be done to implement a SharePoint site. . The list of items can be extremely detailed, but to some degree they needed a simple list just so they could get started and know what needs to get done and when they will have to spent more time on. Here is that simple list. This is your “get started” list that you should incorporate into your project timeline.

-Document libraries and lists
-Analyze document usage
-Plan document libraries
-Plan lists
-Plan enterprise content storage
-Site Navigation
-Metadata
-Content types
-Information management policies (Labels, Barcodes, Auditing, Expiration)
-Records management
-Moving content
-Plan content deployment
-Workflows
-Site Templates
-Working with site templates and definitions
-Content approval
-Versioning
-Check-outs
-Standardization across sites
-People and groups (permissions)

The SharePoint taxonomy provides much more than a common set of terms, it provides a foundation upon which future decisions are made. It provides a scalable hierarchy that allows a SharePoint deployment to grow in an organized, predictable, and understandable manner.

You can visit my other blogs:
Virtualization Concepts
Strong Named Assembly in SharePoint