Forum Discussion
What are your best ideas to automate metadata management
Erik,
I do not believe there is a silver bullet to achieve this. You may have to resort to combining various solutions. The below list provides some ideas, the list is not exhaustive.
- when the source content contains metadata (e.g. subject in an email, title in a Word file, keyword in a PDF file or GPS coordinates in a jpg file) it will be useful if that metadata becomes available in SharePoint columns. So having a solution that can extract metadata from different file types during uploading will help.
- make use of the context. For example, if a user is working in finance and uploading a document then setting the default metadata value for function to finance will reduce effort for the user.
- remember previously entered metadata (on a per user basis).
- deploy tools to convert folder structures into metadata (i.e. flatten folder structures)
Paul | SLIM Applications
Although the search functionality is greatly improving metadata (IMHO) is still KING!
It is my goal to bother the user as little as possible with filling in all kinds of metadata. I do this by creating some sort of folderstructure and then use default values (a feature of a document library) as much as possible,.
My personal best practice is to differentiate between the following 2 roles:
- Content creators
- Content users
The content creators (#duh) create new content.
The content users (#duh) use (thus search for and perhaps update) content.
Mind you: these are roles. One person can use both roles ;-)
Content creators see the folders I mentioned above and create documentation in those folders, or drag/drop documents into these folders. This way the documents automagicly make use of the default values.
Content users can the use the metadata when searching for content, or filter document libraries using that same metadata.
#hopethishelps!