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Wednesday, February 19, 2014

SharePoint Architecture: Role of Enterprise Taxonomy in IA

The single most important task of a SharePoint is to find information.

There are 2 main strategies to achieve this:
       1. Train people look for information in one particular spot.
Like in a real world, in the grocery market, you want to find an apple, you go to Fresh Produce aisle.
       2. Make information searchable the way the people usually search such kind of information.
Like in Internet, whenever you have got a question, you just google it. You don’t need to know where the information is stored, as long as you remember how to reach a search engine, and as long the data is searchable.



In SharePoint world there is a combination of two these strategies that in the end gives rise to Information Architecture.

To put it simply, SharePoint Information Architecture is:
       1. Sites and libraries organization and structure;
       2. As well as, metadata and managed metadata.

Since SharePoint 2010 SharePoint Information Architecture got richer, thanks to a new feature – Enterprise Taxonomy.

Corporate taxonomy is the hierarchical classification of entities of interest of an enterprise, organization or administration, used to classify documents, digital assets and other information.

Right implementation of Enterprise Taxonomy provides common language within the company, across departments.

Mutual agreement on the meaning of words in Enterprise dictionary simplifies the process of:
1. Information tagging
2. Information retrieving


As you can see, Enterprise taxonomy plays crucial role in finding information in portal.

I hope this bird eye overview helps you to identify business problem areas that can benefit from Enterprise Taxonomy implementation.

Read more on Taxonomy ideas and technical challenges


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