A put together metadata service can be used to provision metadata across multiple farms in the organization

I'm at the Microsof company SharePoint conference this week and it's really all about adobe acrobat 9 download. It seems to be a huge release for Microsof company with a wide range of new features for end-users, IT pros and developers. I took in the general keynotes yesterday and then finished the day at the "ECM for the Masses" presentation. Because our focus is on metadata I was especially pleased with this last presentation that begun to dig into all of the new metadata features and how you can be taken for document and information management. Microsof company is really taking on the use of metadata in SharePoint 2010. There are a number of new features that help the user generate valid metadata and help users more effectively search and filter information in SharePoint based on this metadata. I won't be able to cover all the new stuff here, but will be covering this in more detail over the coming weeks and months. I guess the most important new feature is what Microsof company is calling Managed Metadata Services. This is a service that can be activated via Site Settings that allow organizations to define their metadata structure and the metadata that is valid for use within SharePoint. This defined SharePoint taxonomy can be hierarchical if it fits the business. Users can quickly navigate the tree when building content to determine relevant metadata. The Managed Metadata Service is an Enterprise service. A put together metadata service can be used to provision metadata across multiple farms in the organization. As single document ibrary can consume from multiple metadata providers. The metadata can be issued to documents both within SharePoint, but also directly within Office 2010 documents using the properties features in Office 2010 Backstage. Within the properties in Backstage a user can click on a SharePoint custom column name (e. grams Project) and then navigate the SharePoint metadata tree to determine the properties. In addition to the managed metadata service, Microsof company is also taking on folksonomies or ad-hoc metadata in adobe acrobat 10. Users can add their own tags to information. This can be done in document libraries but also in the new social media features such as wikies, blogs etc. SharePoint will keep track of these tags and make them available the very next time a user wants to determine a tag. SharePoint tracks all these add-hoc tags as well as the managed metadata in what they are calling "SharePoint Keywords". So what is so great about all of these new metadata features? Well it's how you can be taken that's powerful. Microsof company has introduced the concept of "navigators" in adobe acrobat x standardthat will allow users to find information very quickly. These navigators can can be found in a left hand pane of SharePoint. By clicking on metadata tags or by navigating a metadata hierachy in the navigator, the user can narrow down the scope of the information they will be using in SharePoint. For instance the user could navigate to Finance metadata, and then perhaps to mergers, to find all of the documents which have been tagged as "merger" in the document library. This is great stuff for e-discovery also. This article is propery of Titus-Labs.