Peter Ward

Meta data – Documentation Management in Teams

Written by Peter Ward | Dec 31, 2020 9:09:48 AM

Everyone has been document management in SharePoint, yes the Site Columns, Content Types, Document libraries and Site Templates get this functionality in Teams?  As this is what everyone wants.

The Challenge

In the SharePoint world all of these components are very nicely contained a Site Collection and are reusable across a Site Collection, hence the name site columns.  I know there are Content Type Hubs for different Site Collections, however there are some issues with this –  See Debugging Issues with Content Type Hub Syndication).

In the Teams world a Team is a its own site collection, so the sharing of design components is restricted, if not there.

This blog post explains a custom approach to the Teams meta data challenge.

The Solution / Approach

Where to store the shared values?

As you cannot use Site Columns in different, put everything in the Term Store. 

The Term Store for SharePoint Online is a global directory of common terms that might be used in your organization. The idea behind the Term Store is that you want to create consistency in the way data is entered and managed throughout your SharePoint environment.

Quentin Russell’s blog post explains Term Store Management very well.

Also SharePoint Online Term Store

One of the advantages of the Term Store is that you can have cascading values. In a field drop down.

VIDEO:

This will allow values to be accessible across all Team and SharePoint sites.   From the video you can see there’s the ability to tag files at bulk and copy them to a team site.

Team Sites MUST be standardized with column and meta data.

Meta Data Tagging

https://pnp.github.io/sp-dev-fx-controls-react/– Taxonomy picker

https://github.com/pnp/sp-dev-fx-controls-react/ – Taxonomy picker

https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/fluentui#/ Fluent – Date picker

Copies Files to a Team

Summary

This is a custom solution to meta tagging in Teams for something out of the box in SharePoint, but much smoother.

Useful Links

5 Gotchas with SharePoint HUB Sites – Modern Intranet