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Why Create a Taxonomy for a SharePoint ECM Implementation

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I was in a customer presentation the other day and was asked about the importance of a taxonomy to the successful implementation of a SharePoint ECM solution.   Why do you need a taxonomy and what value does it bring to the project?   Taxonomy provides the structure to the SharePoint ECM solution that enables the users to easily find the information that they need to make a business decision.    There are two basic components to a good taxonomy, a well defined and intuitive folder structure and a set of content types and associated attributes.   I usually break the taxonomy into these two components to best address two distinctly different audiences; the “experts” and the “novices”.  The “experts” are the group that uses the system on a daily basis and thus will use the advance features to find information.  The “novices” are the group that may only use the system once a month or once a year to find that one critical item they need to make a decision. 

For the “novices”, an intuitive navigation of the folder structure is key to finding information quickly.  This type of navigation best mirrors the Windows Explorer folder structure and thus the same type of visual navigation that a one would use in locating a document stored on their My Documents Folder.   By providing the “novice” with a visual navigation capability, the system will be viewed as easy to use and will not require constant retraining every time the “novice” wants to find a document.

“Experts” will want to search for documents using their specific knowledge about the content of the document, the document type and the associated attributes.  SharePoint ECM solutions provide a search capability that allows the user to enter that’s specific information about the document into search fields for document retrieval.  These fields can include full text entry, specification of a document type and values for the document attributes.  For example, you are looking for a document that contains the words ‘4^th quarter revenue’.  You would enter the words ‘4^th quarter revenue’ in the full text fields, pick the document type ‘10Q’ for the earnings document’ and the attribute ‘2009’ for the year.  This query will return a single document, the 4^th quarter, 2009 10Q.  This is best way to find the one document that contains the information you are looking for.

As you can see, creating an effective taxonomy is critical to a successful SharePoint ECM implementation.  It helps both the ‘novices’ and the ‘experts’ get the most value out of the information stored in the system.

Comments

Submitted by Chris Riley, ECMp, IOAp September 07, 2010 - 11:13 AM

Alan,

Thank you for the blog post. I just wanted to point out that in 2010 if you are looking to setup a "Taxonomy", you are really setting up one or many term stores as apart of the managed metadata service. I only throw that out there because the lingo between the ECM community and the SP world is not aligning completely. The risk of this is that often people view taxonomy as their site structure which is risky and does not do justice to a proper taxonomy.

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Submitted by Allan Spina September 11, 2010 - 2:24 PM

Alan,
Very nicely put. We all have to agree that words may evoke different meanings to different audiences. I agree with you and describe the word "Taxonomy" as the 'categorization and classification of items', regardless of what the items are. Biologists, Chemists and Library Scientists know this well, as their naming and classification schemas rely heavily on taxonomy. As per the Microsoft SharePoint capabilities, it relates as Chris mentions. In dealing with my clients related to Sharepoint 2010, I've been using the broader definition to ensure that Term sets, Content Types, Columns, and Libraries (including folders and document sets) all have Taxonomic meaning within themselves, as well as relationships between eachother.

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Submitted by Hank Seebeck November 09, 2010 - 12:19 PM

I'm a believer and recent practitioner of taxonomies, but new to SharePoint as an info architect. I have an IT background, but have not had the experience of working a project that implements SP as an ECM, until now. From what I read SP2010 embraces taxonomies and metadata (as you pointed out in your reply), but I have my doubts for MOSS 07. Is MOSS 07 a lost cause for a very large, ECM implementation, or is there a straightforward taxonomic mapping?

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Submitted by Randy Fine September 23, 2010 - 3:08 PM

A taxonomy is a highly structured controlled vocabulary. It may require you to employ indexers (people, not technology) to classify information and apply the appropriate major and minor subject headings, and maintain and publish that list. As somone who has studied search behaviors, especially in college students, my findings were that, unless a user is well trained in search methodologies, they are a "enter one search term at a time" type user.

A folksonomy is and unstructured vocabulary that allows a user to tag information with their own vocabulary. The technology can help by suggesting previously applied tags, for example, or presenting the tags in a cloud, similar to the one in the top right part of this Blog's screen

My sense of the critical component of the success of the users' searches is not the controlled vocabulary, but the frequency of users applying tags, somwhat imperfect natural language search algorithms, and, perhaps most of all, strong contextual instructions on how to make the search engine work best.

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