In a first post, the process of setup a managed metadata store has been explained, and it is now time to use the enterprise term store in the different list and document libraries. This post will review the following steps :

• Site Column creation
  
• Site Content Type creation
  
• Document Library creation
  
• Metadata navigation setup

As a best practice, every time a custom column is needed, a new content type should be created, and this has not changed since WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007. To create a content type with a managed keyword column, you first start by creating a site column.
In your site, go into the Site Actions menu and select Site Settings. Under the Galleries section, select Site Columns to display all the existing columns that have been defined (see below).

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Click the Create button leads you to the Create Column screen (see below).

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At the end of the column type list, a new Managed Metadata type can be selected enabling you to select the needed term set to this column. The other settings are the same as in MOSS 2007, except the last one that proposes the selection of the term set. It is even possible to select a sub-set of the term set, by going deeper in the tree. Just above the term set selection box, it is also possible to look for a specific term. Finally, as for the other kinds of column types, you can select a default value from the term set tree that will be assigned to the column (see below).

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Now, the column is ready to be used in a content type. Again, in the Site Actions menu, select Site Settings and then Site content types under the Galleries section (see below).

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Click on the Create button sends you to the New Site Content Type screen (see below).

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Just enter a name for the content type, a parent one and a group under which the content type should appear in the list. This screen has not changed since WSS 3.0 After the confirmation, click on the newly created content type in order to edit it (see below).

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Under the Columns section, click the Add from existing site columns link. Remember the group in which the created column has been stored and select it in the Available columns and click the Add button. Once the column is in the Columns to add list, click OK to save the content type (see below).

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The content type is now available for any document library or list.
Clicking on the Libraries link, all the document libraries for the site will be listed. To create a new one, click on the Create button, select Document Library under the Library group, enter a name and click the Create button (see below).

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You will be redirected to the library. What you need to do now is to add the content type to the library. In the Ribbon, select the Library tab and click the Library Settings. In the Advanced Settings, you have to Allow management of content types and confirm the new setting to enable the addition of content types to the library (see below).

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The Content Type to add to the library is the one you created few minutes ago. In the Library Settings, under the Content Types section, click Add from existing site content types. From the Available Site Content Types, click on the one you created and click the Add button (or directly double-click on the content type), then click the OK button (see below)

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The new content type will be displayed under the Content Types section.
Now, if you want to restrict the available content types, it is possible to remove the unwanted ones from the list using the same configuration screen.
To be able to use the metadata for the navigation and the filtering in the different lists and libraries, the Metadata Navigation and Filtering site feature has to be activated. This can be done by going in the Site Actions menu, Site Settings then Manage Site Features under the Site Actions section (see below).

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When you come back to your Library Settings, a new option named Metadata navigation settings will appear (see below).

Click on the link and for both Configure Navigation Hierarchies and Configure Key Filters, select the column that will store the metadata (see below).

It is time now to upload a new document. Once the document is selected, the next screen will prompt for a file name and to associate a metadata (see below).

Clicking on the button on the right of the field allows to select the value directly from the taxonomy picker (see below).

Do this for several documents.
On the left of the document library, a panel where some filtering can be done based on the metadata or keywords is displayed, but it is also possible to select in the tree the items we are interested in. On the fly, the list of documents or items is filtered offering a nice way to find the material we are interested (see below).

In this post we saw how to apply the metadata to a content type then to a document library to enable us to filter the data more easily (see below).

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The Managed Metadata Service is not only responsible of the management of the enterprise taxonomy, but it also provides the content type syndication, which is something that will be covered in another post, so, stay tuned….

Side note : This is the first time I used docs.com to edit and prepare a post with the combination of skydrive for the images. It was quite interesting, really amazing and useful. No need to store any file on a local drive, everything was online. Really great ! This post is then also available on docs.com : http://docs.com/15K0