Microsoft 365 SharePoint Term Store and Metadata

Episodes in the Microsoft 365 SharePoint Term Store and Metadata Series

  1. Microsoft 365 SharePoint Term Store and Metadata
  2. Using SharePoint Managed Metadata for Search

Like what you see??

"Ask Sympraxis" is a bi-weekly webinar series, where we discuss an array of topics and answer your submitted questions. Join us by downloading our recurring calendar event. You can also join us directly in the meeting without downloading the event.

See a listing of Ask Sympraxis episodes by topic covered: Topic List, Series List, or a full listing Archive

In this Ask Sympraxis session, we delve into the intricacies of the SharePoint Term Store, a critical component for maintaining consistency in how we categorize and tag content across an organization’s intranet.

What is the SharePoint Term Store?

The Term Store in SharePoint is essentially a repository for commonly used terms. It provides a tenant-wide or site-wide source of terms organized hierarchically, ensuring we use the same language when working in SharePoint. This consistency is crucial as it makes information easier to find. However, agreeing on the terms can sometimes be challenging since different groups might prefer different terms, such as “policy” versus “guideline.” To address this, the Term Store allows for alternate labels or synonyms. When users type an alternate label, SharePoint pulls up the actual term, making it easier to standardize language across the organization.

Information Architecture and the Term Store

From an information architecture perspective, managed metadata is the gateway to accessing the content in the Term Store. Managed metadata brings consistent tagging to content across multiple sites. While term sets and term stores can be built at the local site level, it’s generally more effective to manage them at the tenant level.

Managing the Term Store

When it comes to managing the tenant Term Store, you must be a SharePoint admin. This is often a role assigned to someone in the IT department. However, please remember that managing the terms is more of a content-related role. For local term stores, site owners can access them through site settings, but changes require admin privileges for the taxonomy, term group, or term set. The first step is to create a term group for the organization, under which all the term sets should hang. SharePoint also supports translations and synonyms for terms in multiple languages, allowing for complex term management across linguistic variations.

Managing Terms

Term management is an ongoing activity and needs a dedicated role. Instead of deleting terms that might still be in use, you can deprecate them, preventing new content from being tagged with them while keeping existing tags intact. Pinning, reusing, and merging terms are other useful features.

Known Issues

We also touched on some known issues, particularly with the deprecated SharePoint APIs. While you can still perform reads, updates now require the use of Microsoft Graph. The Graph’s APIs aren’t as robust as their SharePoint predecessors, missing some key capabilities.

PowerShell with the Term Store

The Graph and the Graph SDK use different terminology, so if you’re using the Graph SDK, look for terms with “term” in them, whereas with PnP PowerShell, the same thing is referred to as “taxonomy.” These tools are particularly useful for importing and exporting terms, especially in test environments or during migrations.

What’s next?

There are numerous resources available for further learning. We encourage you to explore these and join us in two weeks as we continue our discussion on managed metadata in SharePoint, focusing on its use for search. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out!

All Resources

Do you have any questions for us? Continue the conversation on Twitter with the hashtag #AskSympraxis and mention @SympraxisC.