Chapter 30
Creating Metadata Services
The Metadata Service enables you to tag content with notes, keywords, or brief canned phrases such as “I like it.” It also enables you to apply ratings to items in lists or libraries according to a five-star system. And it enables you to create content types that span site collections. (See Lesson 12 for more details.) Most people associate this service with the ability to create hierarchies of tags made up of things like sales division names or product line titles and then apply those tags to categorize data. You can use the data to enable better search and navigation.
This lesson departs slightly from the overall theme of this book. Most of the lessons deal with administrative elements of SharePoint that do not involve the Central Administration site or anything that requires farm level access. Because of the nature of the Metadata Service, we are making an exception for this lesson. SharePoint 2010 is a series of services. If you want to perform a search, you activate a service. If you want My Sites, you activate a service. And if you want to be able to tag your content, you activate the Metadata Service.
With all these services, it is possible to make an individual user an administrator for just one. Practically speaking, the average business user who is not a SharePoint expert or farm administrator isn't going to be put in charge of configuring search or the business intelligence features, for example. With the Metadata Service, however, ...
