Modernizing SharePoint Managed Metadata Services (MMS)
Published Apr 03 2020 01:43 PM 51.2K Views
Microsoft

For organizations, finding and governing content is critical to improve productivity.  Content metadata—also called properties, attributes, columns, terms or tags—is essential for information architecture, workflow, and compliance. Managed Metadata Service (MMS) delivers centralized management of taxonomy (hierarchies of tags and terms) and content types. Today, MMS is used to provide a unified set of terms to apply to content in Microsoft 365.

 

As we prepare for the general release of Project Cortex later in 2020, our first step is to update the MMS in SharePoint.  In April 2020, we’ll start to release the following enhancements to Targeted Release:

  • A modern term management system in the SharePoint admin center. 
  • A modern content type gallery in the SharePoint admin center, to create and manage content types in the content type hub. 
  • An update to the tagging and filtering interface for MMS columns in lists and libraries.

Importantly, these features will require no migration or change to the data—terms or content types—in your existing MMS, but will unlock new capabilities for admins and information workers.

.

Managing taxonomies in the SharePoint admin center

You’ll find the new term manager in the Content services section of the SharePoint admin center, providing modern, integrated controls for the creation and management of organizational taxonomies and glossaries.   You’ll be able to work with your preexisting global term sets and create new sets without reconfiguring your existing MMS Taxonomy.  We’ve also increased the number of terms supported at a tenant level from 200,000 to 1,000,000.

 

Figure 1 - Modern taxonomy managementFigure 1 - Modern taxonomy management

 

Content type gallery

You can now manage content types in the new content type gallery in the SharePoint admin center. 

 

What’s a content type?  Content types create a hierarchy of information categories that you can use to define templates, metadata and document processing rules. 

 

The content type list allows you to group on different columns and save custom views. The content type gallery also streamlines the process of adding, removing or changing custom columns.  The new gallery provides a centralized view over content types originally established in the original site-based content type hubs.

 Figure 2- Content Type GalleryFigure 2- Content Type Gallery

 

 

Figure 3 - Managing content typesFigure 3 - Managing content types

 

In SharePoint lists and libraries, an updated tree view makes it easier to tag and filter content with terms.   

 

Figure 4 - Managed metadata filteringFigure 4 - Managed metadata filtering

 

What’s next

We’ll have the product team available live to answer questions on MMS during the Project Cortex Office Hours call on May 20, 2020.

 

After the initial release of modern MMS experiences, we’ll be updating the site-based admin experiences to match the tenant admin interface.  And we’ll have new APIs ready to empower custom development using Microsoft Graph and RESTful syntax.

 

Updating MMS will provide great value to SharePoint today, and MMS will be essential to delivering new premium value to Project Cortex later this year.  Thank you.

53 Comments
Copper Contributor

 Hey Chris, thanks for the great news! #NerdAlert...I’m super excited about this! :thumbs_up:

Deleted
Not applicable

@Chris McNulty - this is the biggest news re SharePoint MMS and records management since I started with Digital Dashboard back in 1999!  See my LinkedIn article on why I think this is a big deal.

Iron Contributor

Excellent. Thanks @Chris McNulty 

Iron Contributor

Thanks for the update @Chris McNulty  I am very keen to get my hands on the Content Type Gallery and Analytics features !! 

Copper Contributor

Thanks for the update @Chris McNulty  can't wait to have dive in and start leveraging this

Brass Contributor

Can we expect same features  on single sites, using local meta data ?

Iron Contributor

This for me was in the top 3 from ignite... I have been waiting and it is nearly here... April!!! 

Thanks guys this is a long awaited update and at last positions Term sets where they belong as a core content management tool...

 

@Marijn Somers @Marijn Somers  (do you know you have 2 accounts)  definately in the #Office365Distilled podcast soon... www.office365distilled.com 

 

Steve

Microsoft

@Heiko Fuhrmann , the site collection term management capability is on plan and we will share in the near future on its release plans.

Microsoft

@Steve Dalby looking forward to the podcast, thanks!

Steel Contributor

Hi @Chris McNulty , quick question if the MMS is in the admin center. What happens to those people who are not SharePoint admins that manage the term store today. Either as group managers or full term store administrators? 

Will the old term store be accessible for site collection admins? 

 

Just I have a scenario where my customers comms team manage their intranet navigation that way. 

We were due to start on a modern replacement but Covid has delayed it significantly. 

 

Thanks 

 

Iron Contributor

Hi Chris,

 

As an MVP this looks awesome and the future looks bight, so for example will we:

 

  • Be able to use MMS filter in Delve/Personal settings to get the global content management view
  • Have Graph consider MMS and compare my tags with content tagged by colleagues and peers (one example)
  • See advance MMS features in Project Cortex from the beginning?

As always it is important to ensure things are appropriately tagged to ensure the value is applied as the recipient apps (e.g OneDrive file view, Cortex etc.) leverage the managed tags.

 

For me timing is perfect with a big migration across to SPO now slightly delayed but timely as we can truly manage centralized management of content...

 

Steve

Microsoft

Hi - @Philip Worrell we will also bring the same functionality to the site-based term store management experience as well, so you don't need to add users as full administrators to let them administer their section of MMS.  

Steel Contributor

Thanks for the clarification @Chris McNulty  appreciated as always

Copper Contributor

Oh man. Thanks for this great addition. Waiting since almost 2 years to hear on this.

 

I see they are part of admin portal like other implementations going forward. As per security implementation, today we have a separate site collection like "Content Type Hub" and our KT team has access to that sites, so they manage content types, taxonomy etc. Is it something going to be same that a specific group can access Admin Portal and they only see what they have access like Content type hub admins or owners? Little confusion here. 

 

Also, Today we are facing unsolved issues like content type syncing to newly created modern sites takes over 2-3 days sometimes. Hope they will be resolved with new implementation. 

 

thanks

-Praveen.

Brass Contributor

@Chris McNulty can you tell me about the "manage workflows" button within the new Content Type Gallery?

Brass Contributor

The possibility  to restrict meta data group to special audiences only is one pain point.
If you create a special group everyone on any site can use.
If the business case for this term store group  is obsolete, you can not delete because may be in other areas used and you are not aware.
There is no life cycle management possible.
Also  a better capacity monitor required, able to see the trending. So we reached already the limit only with user profile data and AD sync.

Copper Contributor

This is quite possibly the best thing to happen to SharePoint since the introduction of modern pages and sites.

 

If the effort also manifests itself in adding global metadata to these sites and libraries with a template, then I’m all in.

 

As for us twits who implemented legacy Records Management best practices, please don’t leave us in the lurch.

 

Global Records Management is still a MAJOR point with no backward compatibility or restructuring allowed through the UI or PS. 

Steel Contributor

@Chris McNulty , will the list & library updated tree view filter will show only terms of the terms set that are used in the list/library items (not displaying the unused terms)? 

 

For the content type gallery, will we be able to push a content type to specific sites collection?

 

Thanks.

 

 

Brass Contributor

Hi Chris,

 

This is great news! At last, the Managed Metadata Service and Content Type Hub gets updated, after 10 years... :)

 

Are you planning on adding any new features to either of these services, or are they just being modernized? I can't seem to find (above) any news related to new features.

Copper Contributor

Great! 

MMS has been horrendous admin experience and the taxonomist and information architect's worst nightmare. ;) @Agnes Molnar 

@Chris McNulty the new modern UX looks very nice. I have questions relating to building rich taxonomies or thesauri, and ontologies?

  1. Will MMS TermStore enable poly-hierarchal concepts? Having the option to both expresses narrower and broader, but also allow concepts (terms) relationships to different contexts.
  2. Connecting the Knowledge Topics within the Knowledge Center with terms (concepts) in MMS, and the derived relationships (related Knowledge Topics) from the Graph. In essence, enable curating ontologies (knowledge graphs) or schemas with expressive relationships between the nodes and shapes in the graph, and possibly also apply constraints to properties?
  3. Importing, re-using and link to open vocabularies, terminologies and knowledge graphs, i.e linked-open-data domain based on open standards from W3C as RDF, SKOS , SHACL?
Microsoft

@Frank-Ove Kristiansen The modernized experiences are what we're covering in detail in this post. Some new features that would follow later this year with Project Cortex are reports on term store composition, a new import format for term sets and some improvements to content types. You can find information on what you can expect with Project Cortex here, which also mentions these. And as Chris mentioned in What's next, we're also working on making new APIs available later this year.

Microsoft

@Martin Coupal The updated filter will have two views - a List view which would have just those terms that are used in the list/library, and a Tree view that would show the complete hierarchy of the terms in the term set that is bound to the column.

Microsoft

@Patrick Abel The Manage workflows option is the same as the Workflow settings option available for a content type in the Content type hub today. But we'd strongly recommend that you use PowerAutomate going forward.

Microsoft

@praveenbattula The admin center as it is today is accessible only to SharePoint admins. Site collections can continue to be used to manage the Content type hub and taxonomies and we're working on modernizing those experiences as well after this.

Copper Contributor

Thanks for the update @Chris McNulty !
Will we be able to call the MMS values in, for example, a Label or Policy? This would make automating tagging / classification easier and also allow us to target managed terms with information governance tools.

Iron Contributor

In the past I often experienced consistency issues with centrally configured content types: When site owners made chances to colums or settings on list level, the inheritance was broken resulting in a list content type that would not be updated any more when the centrally configured CT was changed.

 

@Chris McNulty: Will there be new/additional capabilities that will help us keep content types in sync and prevent list content types from being corrupted as described above?

Brass Contributor

@Chris McNulty ,Will there be an updated mechanism to push content types to sites with the new CT gallery? A challenge today is to hook content types from the hub to site designs because of the timer job delay. We can't use CTH columns to set list views because they arrive after the site design execution

Still good news overall! :)

Thanks!

Iron Contributor

Excellent.. Love these features

Steel Contributor

@Chris McNulty the new managed property picker experience in Library is not working as expected. If I have terms that are disabled for tagging, the new picker will allow to select them.... If I revert to standard picker, it will work.

 

A little bit more testing would be appreciate so I don't waste many hours a week reporting bugs! I'm sure you understand :)

 

Thanks.

Microsoft

@Martin Coupal That fix took longer to reach everyone than expected. We believe that it should be addressed now. 

Steel Contributor

Thanks, it is resolved now.

Copper Contributor

@Chris McNulty  , i am facing issue when my library has Managed Metadata fields with Allow Multiple set to True and Required is True.

Even after i select the values, the field prompts that data is missing and does not allow me to save the document attributes.

Works fine with classic layout .

 

Note that my Managed metadata field is created as Site Column and added to Custom Content Type.  Please help !

Copper Contributor

Hi @Chris McNulty , today the treeview and listview options in the filterpane is gone?

Copper Contributor

And this is precisely the reason why people resist adopting new changes. When will Microsoft stop treating its paid subscribers as beta testers?

 

Enforced preview releases are on thing but, until you get it right, PLEASE refrain from releasing it to the rest of us!

Microsoft

@gmorken Could you let us know more about your issue? Is it that you do not see the "See All" option in the filter pane, even after having more than 5 values from the term set used in the list?

Copper Contributor

@AnupamFrancis Yes I have more than 5 values used from the term set and I dont see the "See All" option. I dont see the treeview or listview option either. The metadatafield is formatted with "Display the entire path to the term in the field" under display value setting
Strange thing is that this was working two days ago.

Brass Contributor

This update has a significantly negative impact on anyone storing full term paths of managed metadata in columns in lists/libraries. Filtering by default is set to list view, which looks super clunky with term;term2;term3;term4.... etc. The tree view in the filter pane is a much nicer default for anyone using full term paths. I'm thankful we have an option to go to tree view still, however adding an additional couple clicks and a pop up window to accomplish this tree view filtering is a pretty clunky user experience.

Deleted
Not applicable

@Paul Noone This entire thread highlights the lack of proper UAT on new feature releases in SPO.  Unlike the SPS only days when MS had to test thoroughly BEFORE sending out an update or Service Pack, these days they announce a new feature that is then released as a Preview which will be used by early adopters and those who have specific knowledge or an existing use case for the feature.  These users are performing free UAT services for Microsoft in live environments, great for MS but no good for our users!  As for UserVoice, don't even ask....... It highlights how little thought/planning goes into new features if they have to debug/update them based on user feedback.

 

@jkiblerfbibuildings  Expect this to get a lot worse as MS turn everything in SPS into an 'app', Microsoft Lists was the first, Microsoft Libraries cannot be far behind, why they are trying to compete with Google and Apple in the Consumer space is beyond me, but it is clear that Enterprise customers are no longer their focus.

 

As for the Blue Badgers who post on these forums, their main aim is to become a 'celebrity' with a social notwork following.  I follow them on Twitter (because that is where the first indication of a new feature is), but I do not give a toss what their opinions are on breast feeding, politics, black lives, mental health, autos, raising children, home working tips, "the zeitgeist", blah, blah, blah.  Have these guys ever heard of "Work/Life balance"?  You are being followed because you are a Microsoft Employee - no other reason.  Steve Ballmer would never have allowed this situation to arise, he would have enforced separate social notwork feeds for Microsoft and personal posts.

 

Never mind, back to my day job of rolling out a 50,000 user SPO infrastructure.  I will be putting off opening my Office 365 Message Center "Major Change Update Notification" emails before downing my first coffee.  I want to delay as long as possible finding out what untested features are being inflicted on my new user base..... ;)

Microsoft

We appreciate your feedback and will continue to work on improving the experiences offered. There is significant testing before any release. After testing, we ensure that releases go through gradually expanding rings. We ensure we address any issues before we consider expanding releases, in a transparent manner. An issue was identified in the new content type gallery as it made its way through the Targeted release rings, which may cause a sub-optimal experience. To mitigate it, the option will be temporarily hidden. The fixes for that have been implemented, and are currently being rolled out to existing users, before we make it more broadly available to Standard release.

Steel Contributor

@AnupamFrancis , I think what the message here from customers to Microsoft is not regarding experience but clearly testing. If there is significant testing, there is surely something that needs to be improved here because there are too many times where I found issues after a couple of minutes testing. 

 

Suggestion: Maybe you should have a testing ring where people would be paid by Microsoft when they found an issue?

 

Thanks.

Brass Contributor

Sorry to add to this, but I too got a bad experience with the modern term picker: we have an open-term set where users are expected to add new terms often. Suddenly, the modern picker appears and there this option doesn't exist anymore. No normal end-user would figure out that they need to click on "return to classic" to do this. It is too half-baked to be released to everybody.

Brass Contributor

@AnupamFrancis 

 

Thanks for the response. Is there anything you can say about the filter pane? I think most of the discussion has been on the details pane and adding the picker for applying MMD info to a column, but I haven't seen much said on selecting MMD in the filter pane.

 

FWIW I like the new picker in detail pane, especially because it defaults to the tree view of the MMD. The filter pane's default list view is what's killing me. I think a solid fix for this would be to allow us to select in settings the default view for MMD in Filter Pane, perhaps even by column. An additional setting in the Column Settings that says "Default Filter View: Listview or Treeview" I think would do the trick. It'd be nice to not have to click "See All" to get to this point either. I'd just like my tree view in the filter pane back the way it was :)

 

Here's an example of the ugliness when list view and MMD that displays full term path are combined:

 

jkiblerfbibuildings_0-1593175165907.png

 

Steel Contributor

@AnupamFrancis , when accessing the new terms picker in document properties, when we hover on a term, there is no more term description that pops up like there is in the classic picker. We need to get this back for end users...

Brass Contributor

A little disappointed this conversation has died... this feels like an important issue to me. Is there any intention of fixing the managed metadata filtering experience? This is still grieving me and my end users, it's awful to have useful functionality we've built a dependency on get ripped away.

Brass Contributor

Hello again, 

 

I'd like to share briefly what I've done to move on from this issue in case it benefits anyone else. I'm somewhat new to SharePoint administration and development - so bare with me if implementing this sort of customization is common sense.

 

With the MMD filtering being such a poor UI experience for anyone using term paths as opposed to single terms (see my above post for an example), and with no acknowledgment (that I'm aware of) of this being an issue, I decided the best thing I could do is learn how to work with SPFX and customize our experience.

 

If you're unfamiliar with SPFX, a google search can get you started on setting up a dev environment and creating your first webpart.

Some kind folks have made some really nice controls on pnp.GitHub.io. I used their TaxonomyPicker to create a web part that lets you choose Taxonomy terms in a tree view or by text search. I then followed this guide to share my selected terms with another webpart that displays the library and filters by the selected terms.

 

My second web part implements a datatable from datatables.net, I believe I followed this guide: https://www.c-sharpcorner.com/article/display-sharepoint-list-data-with-jquery-datatable-in-sharepoi.... My intention was to display the document library in a very clean fashion that's easy to filter. I added a filter row to the top of my datatable and implemented a receiver (from guide linked above) that would get the data from my TaxonomyPicker webpart and filter my MMD column appropriately. Datatables.net had plenty of information on how to customize the table.

 

It took me a couple of days to figure it all out and have the webparts working properly, but the UI experience for our customers (read only users) is vastly improved now with our use case. Below is an image of what the page looks like with the two web parts. I was also pleased that without any mobile-specific customization the page works really well.

 

I don't really mean to create a guide here - but I'm happy if this helps anyone else to continue using MMD in the way they need to without compromising on user experience.

 

Capture.PNG

Copper Contributor

As to the SPFX solution above, it is quite impressive, even if its parts are available from pnp.github. It is certainly beyond my novice skill level nor would I have two days to devote to the task if I had the skills. Hopefully, MS will incorporate this solution into Content Services in the near future.

Copper Contributor

So the conversation ended here without any updates from Microsoft?

I have several large customers complaining about the Tree-filter on Meta-data is no longer working. And guess what, it isn't!

 

It has a new look which is good, but since the actual function of a filter isn't working anymore they are already thinking of swapping systems to something else. 

 

Please give us a heads up Microsoft that you are at least working on this one! 

Brass Contributor

Submitted a support ticket on this issue, trying to do what I can to raise awareness about this. Has anyone had any luck contacting Microsoft regarding this issue? I'd just love to have some sort of update or acknowledgment of the issue by Microsoft. Glad to see others confirm the issue on their end. I feel like the development team completely overlooked the use case of displaying the full term path, or maybe filtering just wasn't tested this way.

Copper Contributor

As an answer to @AnupamFrancis mentions that it is recommended to use Power Automate instead of what it currently links to, the old "workflow settings". How do you use Content type triggered flows? I have yet to figure that out.

 

Also. I have now over 3 days tried to publish a content type at a customers environment and nothing happens. How and what do you need to do in order to access the content types in your environment?

Brass Contributor

FYI y'all,

 

I've contacted Microsoft Support regarding the managed metadata filtering issue. They've confirmed the issue on their end and it's now in the hands of the engineering team. No ETA yet on when the update/fix will be released, but it's in front of them and acknowledged now so I'm happy about that.

 

Thanks!

Version history
Last update:
‎Apr 03 2020 03:59 PM
Updated by: