Managed Metadata
Metadata, as covered previously, is an awesome alternative to organising your documents in a nested folder structure. It’s a way to tag information against a document and has heaps of benefits that will future proof your document management system.
If you have metadata that is relevant only to a specific document library or list, then you would define this at a local level.
An example of this may be a document library that stores car manuals for when employees book a company car. It has a choice column for selecting / filtering by the car brand. This choice column would not be relevant for HR, Marketing or IT, so it makes sense to create this column at the local document library level.
You may however have metadata that would be relevant across multiple sites and document libraries.
As an example, you may have policies, forms, procurement and admin that all need to be able to filter their documents by department. In this case, it would be time consuming to both create and manage a choice column for each of these sites and document libraries. This is where you would create managed metadata instead.
Managed metadata is just metadata that can be used globally across an organisation. It can be added into any document library or list and if anything changes, such as a department name change, it only has to be updated in one place. Changes will reflect anywhere the metadata has been used.
How to set up managed metadata
Managed Metadata is defined in the Term Store – in the SharePoint Admin Center.
1. First, navigate to the SharePoint Admin Center
2. On the left-hand side, click on the drop down for Content Services
3. Select Term Store
4. Then Add term group to create a new set of metadata, then enter your choices. Here I have created a new term set called “Department”, and have added the department names within the set.
How to add a managed metadata column into a list or library.
In your list or document library, create a new column and select Managed Metadata as the type of column.
This directly links to the Term Store and allows you to select which set of metadata / terms you would like to use.
