Metadata Term Store for SharePoint
PremierPoint Solutions has announced two significant new features in Term Sync 2.0, a SharePoint add-on that is claimed to provide the missing link between a company’s business data and its SharePoint taxonomy. Term Sync 2.0 now has two significant new features: support for synchronisation of hierarchical term sets and improved performance in processing, resulting in faster synchronisation.
“From Facebook to Twitter and blogs to Pinterest, tagging in social media is extremely important. We tag, ‘pin,’ hashtag and keyword all kinds of data, in an effort to organise the things we are interested in, so that we can find them again,” said Jeff Cate, president of PremierPoint Solutions.
In the business world, he continued, organising internal data falls under the subject of taxonomy.
Microsoft has made “tagging” using “terms” easy to do in SharePoint through its Managed Metadata feature, and the Managed Metadata Term Store, so that related documents and list items can be organised and easily found.
SharePoint’s Business Connectivity Services (BCS) allows users to import external data important to their business into SharePoint, but it does not provide a way to get that data into one’s term store, from which it can be used to tag documents and list items in SharePoint.
“Because Microsoft did not provide a connection between its BCS and the Managed Metadata feature of SharePoint, the two don’t ‘talk’ to each other. This creates a real problem for companies that want to get their external data into their term store so they can use it as metadata,” Cate explained.
Term Sync 2.0 is designed to bridge that gap efficiently. It is the connector – the missing link – between the data import tool (BCS) and the term store.
“Term Sync gets your line-of-business data into the term store, where it is organised and searchable in the manner you’ve always wanted it to be,” Cate said, adding “It updates your terms as your external line-of-business data changes, keeping your data ‘linked and synced.’”
Managed Metadata Term Store Sync is sold under two licensing options. Under the first option, Term Store Sync is licensed by a 3-pack of Sync Points. (A sync point is a logical location within a term store where external data is synced to create/update terms based on one’s business data.) Under the second (Enterprise) option, sync points are unlimited.