7 Key Reasons to Adopt SharePoint Taxonomy for Document Management

A robust and well thought through taxonomy is mandatory when you’re trying to search within an ECM’s (Enterprise Content Management) vast content, as it plays a pivotal role in the maintenance of documents. Creating and maintaining a successful information management program without taxonomy is near impossible.

SharePoint Taxonomy provides you with more features and convenience, such as a robust hierarchy, leading to improved decision-making, search satisfaction, rapid business processes, and can be extended to support additional languages and extended to index pages and navigation. In addition your taxonomy allows you to extend your SharePoint environment as your content increases.

An effective taxonomy promotes a more flexible, sizable, and extensible framework for the implementation of your SharePoint Information Architecture. An inadequate taxonomy might have dire consequences.

It is also completely compatible with all browsers, all tablets and all form factor devices, and all document management applications.

How to Create SharePoint Taxonomy?

If you wish to create a successful SharePoint Taxonomy, you must first think through, create and test your list of terms, at an enterprise level. Additional capabilities to consider include location based tagging, view and search refinements. You may then want to establish governance processes around metadata tag management. Lastly, improvements are expected from the user, in particular on search refinements. And lastly, it is necessary to plan for organic growth to make appropriate choices for ongoing changes.

Now you might wonder, “what does Taxonomy exactly mean, and why is it crucial for a business?” Well, we’ve got you covered. Keep reading to learn more…

What is a Taxonomy?

A Taxonomy is a combination of Information Architecture, Library Science and Best Practices, which is useful for enterprise data classification. It is a method of classification and organization of things into different groups, supporting multiple levels.

In addition to previously-mentioned uses, it is also vastly used for storing knowledge and information. It is stored in the form of Documents, MP4, articles, tutorials, etc., so that, later, it can be accessed by the users seamlessly and intuitively.

Initially, the term and the process of ‘Taxonomy’ was only used for categorizing organisms or specific species. In Office 365 SharePoint, Taxonomies are implemented within the Managed Metadata Service.

Nevertheless, people started referring to the categorization of information or concepts. Used in SharePoint, taxonomy is a hierarchical classification of terms that are applied to the content when being categorized. Optional automated tagging can execute categorization in real time as content is added upper updated, to add consistency throughout the platform and helps in the management of content.

Keep reading to know why using Taxonomy is crucial for your business.

7 Benefits of using SharePoint Taxonomy – Check it out!

1. Improved Navigation:

It takes enough time & effort to develop an efficient and organized taxonomy, but it is worth it. An efficient SharePoint taxonomy allows users to gather the information they require faster without complicating or alternatively oversimplifying the process.

An established Taxonomy with properly maintained data displays information and concepts in a tidy and easy-to-understand manner, which helps the user to understand it thoroughly, which saves them much time while also improving navigation. Actual navigation in SharePoint can also be tied to a Taxonomy.

It enables the visitors to intuitively understand the method of navigating through documents aligned with their business requirements without wasting unnecessary time and resources. In addition, it improves search relevancy, enhancing the user experience. Further, with use of Metadata Refiners, drill-in on search results is possible.

As there may be a large set of information available for every term in a Taxonomy, the user is challenged to quickly locate the most relevant and reliable data or document quickly, and SharePoint Taxonomy makes it possible.

2. Consistency in Organization:

It is pivotal to create good quality content rather than further wasting time in improving it and messing everything up. A Termset (another word for Taxonomy) allows an enterprise standard way to tag documents consistently and in line with the preferred organizational nomenclature.

SharePoint taxonomy helps you in regaining control and managing your data. Managed MetaData enables the administrator to create a Taxonomy that can be extended to applications and shared across different sites and site collections. Moreover, it consists of a vast variety of capabilities, which enables a user or administrator to enforce a persistent classification to docs. These include multi-select, up to seven levels of hierarchy, languages, and an immutable identifier (known internally as a GUID).

It enables the admin to have complete control of the eligibility and modify the existing taxonomy, which results in a maintained quality of information and security.

When this consistency is maintained throughout the sites, it becomes easy for the user to access and understand concepts. It helps users to find relevant data easily while also building trust.

3. Increased Productivity:

You can more effectively work with your business information when your system for putting documents into SharePoint is streamlined and organized. You can utilize more of SharePoint and make the most of it by using a taxonomy.

It translates into better decision-making, more efficient business operations, for content customers and ends users. Additionally, your taxonomy enables SharePoint to grow along with content as it expands without worrying about where to store new data.

Once you reduce project implementation time and redundancy, consistency will be improved, and improved consistency will directly result in inclined productivity.

4. Self-regulate your Business Operations:

Once you have the metadata structure defined as a well thought through hierarchy, you can have the surfaced in sites, libraries, document tagging, search refiners, and begin to utilize it for business uses. It means creating self-regulated business processes, workflows, managing end users’ productivity, etc.

An efficient SharePoint Taxonomy should be the initial step if you wish to proactively manage of your documents and overall SharePoint environment in a coherent and business-consistent and extensible manner.

Now you might be thinking, “how does this exactly automate any part of document management?”

Well, here’s the answer: it makes the process of tagging the metadata automatic. Location based metadata tagging is something we at Reality Tech recommend and configure. It is one of the most significant features as users do not prefer to tag documents manually with metadata, or sometimes manually tagged documents might be tagged incorrectly. Taxonomy is helpful to guide a system regarding concepts that are crucial for business.

5. Improved Adaptability:

It becomes simpler for the admin to sustain and adapt your metadata centrally when your business demands change, and it consists of managed metadata. When it comes to changing a set of terms, it is more simplified when done with SharePoint Taxonomy, as this can be done centrally and in a controlled fashion, so the updates propagate throughout the SharePoint environment.

In addition to that, when a column of managed MetaData is linked with a set of terms, new and updated terms set are available automatically.

For instance, when you combine several terms into a singular term, the whole linked set of documents is updated by itself, showcasing the combination of new terms.

In case it’s a plural term, then it can represent several synonyms for one specific term; if your website is a multi-lingual one, it is also possible to showcase labels in multiple languages for a particular term.

6. Simplified Replacement of Folders:

We are aware of the fact that Metadata is simply a standard and central way to use tags to navigate documents. The way it works is analogous and works in harmony with the folders created.

Nevertheless, the ability to create more than one Metadata field is the highlight here. It is advisable to use Metadata because of issues like difficulty in storing all the files related to a project in one place, or to use a single dimensional tag or taxonomy for all document needs.

So multi-dimensionality is where we extend the Information Architecture beyond a single hierarchy. Let’s understand How?

Well, here’s how: you must create a column for both the project & the department in SharePoint. Which, furthermore, can be used to classify and categorize files. You might feel like it’s not your cup of tea at first, but it will become as easy as a piece of cake once you get used to it. When necessary, needed files, concepts & information can be located easily using MetaData.

7. Security & Privacy:

SharePoint is a Microsoft service that is central to the Office 365 offering, which means that there will be enterprise-class robust and feature rich capabilities regarding the security of data and privacy.

It plays a pivotal role in restricting unauthorized users from accessing your confidential data. It provides you with the authority to control permissions for applications, websites, docs, etc. SharePoint taxonomy lets you keep a record of what kind of information is being accessed by the End Users.

It provides a perfect combination of amenities and control. You can restrict and control the activities of both the users and the team. And you can also decide what kind of information should be accessed by the user and to whom to give eligibility to update the information.

In addition to regulation of work among employees, it also ensures proper security and privacy of your data, which is uploaded to the server by you.

Conclusion:

To sum it up, all sorts and sizes of industries and sectors can have the advantages of Managed Metadata. Microsoft SharePoint is a top-notch platform that keeps your data and documents organized. Not to mention, doing so indirectly also helps you skyrocket your productivity.

In addition to those above major 7 reasons, it also provides you with additional benefits such as Improved User Experience and Simplified Business Processes, Extensibility, Configurability, Customization, Collaboration of Team Members, and so on. All these added benefits make it even more significant for document management.

Now that you know the significance and advantages you’ll get when you opt for SharePoint Taxonomy, it is advisable to use it for document management and other business purposes if you’re willing to devote some thought and planning for keeping the environment categorized and organized and future-proofed.