How to design SharePoint Taxonomy

In general, SharePoint taxonomy refers to a catalog of objects in SharePoint environment or the process of categorizing or classifying objects based on a taxonomic scheme. The ultimate goal of the taxonomy development process is to obtain a comprehensive schema that logically organizes the related objects in a hierarchical structure across a SharePoint implementation.

There are two ways to design and roll out a taxonomy for an organization.

1. TOP-DOWN DESIGN

2. BOTTOM-UP DESIGN


1. TOP-DOWN DESIGN

The obvious way to implement and take advantage of structured taxonomy would be to implement a company-wide taxonomy from day one. This requires that we develop metadata and content types plan across the whole organization before start using the taxonomy. While great in theory, this is very challenging in practice. Development of company-wide taxonomy requires company-wide participation. That means that all departments need to be involved in the development of company metadata and content type strategy. The challenge with this approach is quite obvious. Getting everyone together is a challenge by itself. Moreover, the whole concept of metadata and content types is almost always new to most in early stages of SharePoint implementation. So asking departments to categorize their content, develop metadata tags and content types might seem like learning Greek to many.

2. BOTTOM-UP DESIGN

he other way to develop company taxonomy in SharePoint is to use bottom-up approach. Essentially what that means is that we develop your taxonomy as we develop your sites and migrate content to SharePoint. As we develop the sites and document libraries, we can create metadata. Some metadata will be local or department specific (i.e. HR document types), while some will be company-wide/global (i.e. Department Names). Both might end up in the Term Store and will be the first steps to company taxonomy. As we continue to roll out other sites (say Finance, IT or project sites), we might take advantage of the company-wide/global metadata already created previously. And so on. At the end of the day, we will end up with your company-specific taxonomy that can be used and reused by various departments and types of sites.