I finally got around to reading the preliminary SharePoint 2010 taxonomy and metadata info on MSDN. As most of you know, MOSS 2007 had some serious challenges in this regard (e.g., no hierarchical metadata, no sharing controlled vocabularies across site collections, etc.) — and they caused information architects like me much consternation.

It would appear that SharePoint 2010 includes many new features under the umbrella of Enterprise Metadata Management, and they seem to have addressed some key issues. Here are the highlights.

1. Terms & Keywords

SharePoint 2010 has a few types of vocabularies with different levels of control:

Terms: Basic construct — a word or phrase that can be associated with content. A term can become a managed term or a managed keyword.

Managed Terms: A controlled term that can only be created by those with appropriate permissions. Term sets (think of them as taxonomy facets) are collections of related terms that can be hierarchically structured.

Managed Keywords: User-generated keywords (aka tags) kept in a non-hierarchical list called the keyword set.

What’s nice is that you can easily turn a managed keyword into a managed term, which essentially sets up SharePoint 2010 as a decent platform to blend taxonomy and folksonomy approaches (more on this later).