Metadata is the term used to describe the large amounts of information that routinely flow through some businesses. Depending on the type of company you operate, you might see thousands of emails, blog posts, spreadsheet entries and other forms of data per day. Metadata refers to the overarching “umbrella” that covers all forms of data and groups it into understandable categories.
SharePoint was designed to manage metadata. In fact, there are six important things you can do with metadata in SharePoint that make it the ideal program for managing large amounts of information. According to a recent report, with SharePoint users are able to:
1) Manage information governance. It is now more important than ever for companies to have a grip on managing the information they receive. Sensitive data can be compromised if a company does not pay close attention to the issue of information governance, and SharePoint helps business owners manage this task.
2) Improving search. The ability to quickly and effectively search vast quantities of information is a big concern for businesses. SharePoint has developed strong search capabilities that integrate many useful strategies to help businesses manage large-scale searches on a regular basis. Furthermore, SharePoint’s search capabilities are easy to learn and accessible to the average worker as well as the IT department.
3) Text analytics. The ability to analyze text using sophisticated algorithms is not limited to the search engines anymore. Business owners using SharePoint have the capability of setting up text analytics to alert them of trends, recurring themes and other complicated tasks.
4) Social networking. You may think that businesses would discourage social networking but actually studies have found that most companies want to encourage interaction between employees. One great way to do this is to make the platform more like the social media employees use outside of the office. SharePoint’s Yammer has been very effective in helping workers communicate with each other on a fun and easy-to-use platform.
5) Collaboration. Closely related to social networking is the ability to collaborate in real time with distant colleagues. This collaboration ability is one of the key features of SharePoint. The program allows document revision by more than one person at a time and instantly saves the latest version so that there is no confusion about edits.
6) Content management. The task that most people currently use SharePoint for is content management. Being able to easily manage all the documents of a particularly type is often the initial selling point that drives companies to use Share Point.
SharePoint has a great deal to offer companies and can make metadata management much simpler.