I just read a great blog post by Christian Glessner over at EndUserSharePoint.com. Christian has his own blog called iLove SharePoint where this blog post originally appeared. The topic of the post was "Managing Metadata in SharePoint 2010". Christian covers the following topics:
- What can be tagged in SharePoint 2010
- How to tag list items, documents, SharePoint pages, and external pages
- How to configure a tag cloud web part
- How to manage your tags
- How to predefine keywords and terms for your whole SharePoint farm
As I read Christian's post, I was thinking about how tagging means different things to different people. It really depends on what purpose you have for tagging. If you're using tagging to find documents that you've read in the past, you obviously want a lot of flexibility in how you can tag and what words you can use. If you're a record manager who needs to find documents as part of e-discovery, you'll want a much more structured approach. And if you're an organization that requires users to apply security tags (e.g. Confidential, Restricted) to documents and emails, you definitely want a concise, consistent list of tags to choose from.
As a Product Marketing Manager (and previously Product Manager) at Titus Labs, I've talked to many customers about their classification taxonomies. The most common thing I hear is that people are surprised at how few categories/tags users can logically handle when selecting from a list. Sometimes organizations will start with 4 or 5 security tags in the list, but then quickly pare that down to 3 or even 2 tags. But if more categories are needed, there are ways to make this easier for users. Our products have a feature called "guided classification", where the selection of one category triggers an additional list of categories to open up. So for example, if you select Confidential, you may then get another list that asks you to specify what kind of Confidential (Customer Confidential? Partner Confidential? Internal Use Only?) In general though, we find that it's mostly military customers who want to apply these more detailed classifications, rather than commercial customers.
In any case, I can definitely see the value in different levels of flexibility in tagging. It all depends on what you are trying to accomplish. Fortunately, it looks like SharePoint 2010 will go a long way toward helping users achieve their tagging goals.
- Lara
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