Navigating and Filtering Documents Using Managed Metadata

One of the great additions to SharePoint 2010 is that of Managed Metadata. Apart from other usages you can easily use metadata to navigate and filter documents inside the document library. This provides a very intuitive and natural way of performing filtering as you can drill down into the hierarchy of metadata and documents will be filtered automatically. This walkthrough will demonstrate how to create a managed metadata column, enable metadata based navigation and perform the filtering.

The same metadata based navigation and filtering functionality is available to SharePoint Lists, although not shown in this walkthrough but rest assured it will work.

In order to perform steps in this walkthrough, you will need a SharePoint site collection with at least one document library available in it.

1. Browse to the site collection and select "Shared Documents", this is the document library provisioned automatically when you create new site based on "Team Site" (or site based on many other site definitions e.g. Publishing Site etc.). But you don't have to use it, if you want to create your own it's perfectly fine to do so. The only reason for using it is to save some extra steps and hence time.

Locate the "Library" Tab and click "Create Column" button located inside "Mange Views" group.

2. Give the new column a meaning full name e.g. "Tags", also make sure that you have selected Managed metadata as a type of column as shown below.

In order to use Managed Metadata you have to select the term set, also you should have at least one ready to use. Managed metadata is a broad area please read more about it from TechNet at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee530389.aspx

For this walkthrough I have selected Term Set named "Documents" as shown below. Again depends on your SharePoint environment you may want to use different term set.

Finally click "OK" to save your changes.

3. From the "Shared Documents" document library select "Add new document", choose a document from your local drive and upload it to the document library. Notice that there is "Tags" column present that we have created earlier, you can start typing the name of terms and it will show the suggestions as shown below.

Select the value that suits your need and click "Save." Please note that by default you can only select single value for manage metadata column, but you can always change this behavior from column settings. For this walkthrough add at least one more document to the library and select different value for "Tags" column. This is to make sure that for later steps you have enough documents to apply and view metadata based filtering and navigation.

You should see all the documents along with the values in the "Tags" column, as shown below. Please note that "Tags" column will contain different values depends on actual values you have entered/selected in this step.

4. Now you will configure the metadata based navigation. From the "Library" Tab click "List Settings" as shown below.

On the "List Settings" page select "Metadata navigation settings" from the "General Settings" page as shown below.

Locate "Configure Navigation Hierarchies" section and select "Tags" from the "Available Hierarchy Fields" list box. Next locate "Configure Key Filters" and select "Tags" from "Available Key Filter Fields" list box.

Once the selections are made click "add" button, you have to do this once for each section. This will move "Tags" field to "Selected Hierarchy Fields" and "Selected Key Filter Fields" list box respectively.

Finally click "OK" to save your changes.

5. Notice on the left hand side of the page and just below "Quick Navigation" menu there are two panes available. The first one is for the quick navigation/filtering and second one is for filtering based on the metadata values inside "Tags" columns.

To work with navigation click on "Tags" present on the metadata navigation pane and then select "Sales". Notice that the documents get filtered based on this value. Notice that all the terms are available for you to select and you can do this by a simple click.

6. You can also perform filtering by typing the values yourself. Locate the "Key Filters" pane and inside the "Tags" text box start typing the value on basis of which you want to perform the filtering. Notice that as you are typing suggestions will be provided to you.

If suggestion is correct select it and finally click "Apply" button. Notice that the documents are now filtered based on the value provide for "Tags" columns, which in this case is "Sales".

In this walkthrough you have learned how to create a managed metadata column, enable the metadata based navigation and finally use it perform filtering on the documents inside the document library.