The term “taxonomy” has a bad aftertaste for many business users. Endless meetings, complex implementation and the feeling that everything is already outdated the moment it was finally agreed upon, are only some of the reasons for many organizations’ taxonomy frustrations.

A successful taxonomy-building exercise does not start with technology. Instead, all of the various business stakeholders need to be included in a guided process of determining what metadata dimensions are required to best organize their content. For a taxonomy to be successful, the user has to clearly see the new structure’s ability to make herself, as well as the entire organization, more productive.

Another important factor to recognize is that a taxonomy is never really final. By definition, taxonomies introduce rigidity into the organization. This rigidity is positive, as long as it comes with a certain amount of flexibility. This flexibility is needed to accommodate special cases where there are no suitable taxonomy dimensions available.

Finally, it is absolutely essential for the end-users to actually apply the taxonomy to their individual daily tasks. Experience has shown that there is often a significant disconnect between what an end-user mentions during a requirements-gathering meeting and what he actually needs to efficiently complete his daily work. Therefore, there is no substitute for giving the user sufficient time to test-apply the new taxonomy to his daily tasks. In our experience, there will be numerous iterations of these dimensions based on end-user feedback, before there is a final agreement on the overall taxonomy.

Now let’s take a look at a few key components that SharePoint 2010 offers to help the organization find the above-mentioned compromise between rigidity and flexibility:

Content Types: Content types are the core elements of any taxonomy implementation. They offer you the ability to provide document templates, policies and metadata for all of your organization’s specific document types. For example, you can provide one central proposal document, with a number of required metadata fields like “prospect,” “category,” “product,” “status,” and so forth. You can also specify that all proposals are archived when they are older than 12 months. When creating new proposals, your staff will a) have a consistent template and b) be able to quickly find past proposals that are similar to the one they are in the process of creating. For example, they can filter by “product” or "proposal“ category to see what content their colleagues have produced. This will save them a tremendous amount of time and effort.

Term Store: The term store is new in SharePoint 2010 and can best be described as a central console where you can manage all of your metadata. This means that you can now centrally provide so-called “term sets” to all of your site collections and sites. “Term sets” simply consist of a name (e.g., "client") and multiple values. Taking advantage of the central term store ensures the ultimate consistency of your taxonomy.

Enterprise Keywords: Like the term store, enterprise keywords are new to SharePoint 2010. They provide the end-user with the ability to freely tag content. This is extremely useful, as it allows to keep your centrally managed taxonomy pretty tight, while at the same time offering end-users the flexibility to add additional tags.

We hope this brief overview will stimulate the further taxonomy thought process within your organization. As always, the authors will be happy to answer any kind of questions: tvolk@prinomic.com / rclarke@prinomic.com .