Term Store / Metadata Governance

[Chris Gullicksen]

Hello,

The organization I currently work at has not used the term store or managed metadata at all so I have been reading up on how it all works and testing it out in our SharePoint 2013 on prem test sites.

Here are the two questions I would like feedback on.

1. Is the Term Store Management tool supported in SharePoint 2016?
2. Share some stories or examples of how you manage or have seen term sets managed in SharePoint accross multiple site collections.

Thank you,

Chris G.

[#2]

Hi Chris,

MMD management tools in SP 2016 are identical with what is in SP 2013.

The usage scenarios also are the same. Any SP 2013 MMD stories and manuals are relevant. 

[#3]

Great to hear, thank you.

[#4]

The Corporate Organization Hierarchy is a good use becuase it ensure that anyone who needs to tag a document with a company/division/department does it consitently.

Company office locations is another good example

Standard Industry terms, government agencies, and company acconyms are other uses my clients have implemented. 

[#5]

Hello Chris,

It is definitely a challenge to list all the advantages and use cases in one post. As others have already mentioned, the Term Store works the same way in SP 2016 as in 2013. As far as your question on how to manage it best, I usually advise my clients to separate metadata by departments. While you will sure have common metadata that will fit the whole organization, many departments or business units might have their own, unique term sets. If that is the case, you are better off separating these different term sets into department-specific term groups. The reason for that - you can set security (term managers) by the term group. This will allow the terms to be available to all site collections, but only be managed by each department/business unit without the danger of being overwritten. You can find other advantages of the term store here, in this blog post.

Greg Zelfond, SharePoint Maven