Dockit Metadata Manager for SharePoint allows you to take control of all aspects of metadata management in your SharePoint. As everyone knows, SharePoint content without proper metadata renders SharePoint to be just a storage repository resulting in very poor user adoption and gross under-utilization of the powerful capabilities of SharePoint. Irrespective of whether you have a well settled, on-going production SharePoint environment or you have just begun to streamline your SharePoint metadata before or after your SharePoint migration, you need to have complete control on how your SharePoint metadata is organized and how it needs to be monitored and managed.
There are several situations when metadata of specific lists in SharePoint need to be updated in bulk. For example, in a new SharePoint environment, all newly created lists settings are possibly left to the default values either intentionally or accidentally. After a while, such issues are identified because of user complaints. The challenging task here is identifying the specific settings of lists and make them the same or similar to the source SharePoint environment. The ‘Metadata Organizer’ helps you to accomplish the requirement of not only identifying the settings of the lists but also change such metadata in bulk.
Many users’ would want to update a particular metadata value in a particular list item (or) want to fill a particular metadata value for all items in a list. Each user’s requirement is unique, and hence managing SharePoint metadata in proper way so as to make the search powerful is a tedious job. Most SharePoint administrators view manual metadata updates a cumbersome job, especially when the volume of either the metadata or the content is large. There is no proper user interface in the SharePoint to cater to this requirement and this particular feature in ‘Metadata Organizer’ bridges this gap.
Some users’ want the metadata in an excel document for review and update purposes. Microsoft Excel is still one of the best and preferred tools to modify and update metadata in SharePoint efficiently.
The Analyzer tool in SharePoint Metadata Manager assists you in performing a comprehensive analysis of your metadata and gives deep insights into how your current metadata is organized. Given below are some examples of the kind of SharePoint Metadata Analysis you may perform.
Many SharePoint administrators and managers initially setup their SharePoint environment based on initial requirements of users and the documents that they have. Once the SharePoint environment adoption grows and matures, SharePoint metadata issues start showing up frequently because the underlying basic SharePoint metadata structures are not enough to cater to sophisticated, collaborative use. SharePoint Metadata errors reduced the environment’s maintainability and these are all not easily rectifiable through SharePoint user interface. The SharePoint Metadata Analyzer tool helps you find such errors and fix them.
Analyze the structure of the SharePoint list(s) for issues such as:
As stated earlier, SharePoint administrators initially setup the SharePoint environment based on his initial requirements and the documents that they have. They recognize the mistakes in the environment, after the end users uses the environment in production. One such mistake is that lot of unused columns and SharePoint does not provision to identify the unused columns and this leads to the complexity in the environment. This feature under ‘Metadata Analyzer’ helps you to identify such unused columns in bulk and provisioning you to delete such columns from the list.
Managed metadata service is a powerful feature available in SharePoint for implementing metadata thus providing you great control over how the content is organized in SharePoint. SharePoint Managed Metadata offers several benefits such as maintaining metadata consistency across all Site content, offering flexibility of use, improving navigation of Site Content and improving Search capabilities.
However, the native managed metadata management in SharePoint falls short in a few areas. For example, the scope provided to manage metadata at the site collection level is very minimal in terms of organizing and re-organizing the terms. This can be overcome by using SharePoint term store management tool like Dockit metadata manager. This helps you to classify and organize the entities (such as group, term set and term) in the term store better, such as metadata copy and move operations in bulk at all levels. In addition, you can export the term store (with all entities underneath) to an Excel document. You can edit and classify / organize the terms in Excel and apply these changes in the respective SharePoint term store.