Welcome to our new blog! Over the coming weeks and months we hope to provide useful information and tips and tricks on configuring and using metadata within a SharePoint environment. Metadata has multiple purposes, but we will be concentrating on the uses of metadata for content management and security. Metadata is not a sexy topic, not something usually discussed over weekend cocktails, but it is crucial for successful document and records management. Search and e-discovery become much easier when information has been meta-tagged. We’ll also look at how metadata can be used to classify information. Classification of information and related metadata is what we’ve been doing here at Titus Labs for the last 5 years so we have quite a bit of experience in this area.
A lot of organizations have moved to SharePoint because they want to copy documents that used to be stored on file shares into document libraries where people can more effectively collaborate on projects. This is a good first step, but if you are not creating metadata with your documents you’re missing a great opportunity to get a better handle on your information. Concerns about document security, search and retention become much easier to solve when you have document metadata that is meaningful.
Getting metadata into SharePoint is often the easy part. Figuring out what metadata to capture, when to capture it, and how to use it is the harder part. We are often asked about what to do with older documents that were created before any metadata plan was put in place. This is a challenging question, but there are several strategies and we will be looking at these in the coming weeks.
Charlie
Comments