One of the most compelling features in SharePoint 2010 is Managed Metadata Service, or MMS for short. Simply put, metadata is data that describes other data. A good way to conceptualize metadata might be to think of a photograph that you’ve taken in the past. The photo is the actual data, and metadata that describes it might include the size of the file, where the photograph was taken and who is in it. In this post, I’m going to focus on how MMS can help you manage metadata, and how, if leveraged properly, it can significantly improve the quality of Enterprise Search in your organization.

Why do I need metadata? Why can’t I just search like I do on Google?

This is the question that comes up most often when I’m at trade shows, conferences, what have you. From a user’s perspective, all they do on Google is enter two or three keywords, and voila – relevant results! What they are not seeing happens behind the scenes, before their query is ever run. The two or three word query is boosted by metadata.

One of the most common complaints about SharePoint search in MOSS 2007 was the inability to use Wildcards and Boolean Operators when performing search queries.  Both of these capabilities were supported by the search API but required either custom code or 3rd Party Search Utilities to take advantage of this. 

The good news is that SharePoint 2010 now supports both Wildcards and Boolean Operators when performing search queries!  What does this mean? 

Information retrieval experts define relevance as having two components; Precision and Recall In an Enterprise setting it is difficult to achieve acceptable measures in either. Here’s why:

Precision

When a user runs a two or three word query, there will be many documents that contain those terms. Naturally only a few of those documents will be relevant to you. This results in a very lengthy list of hits that the user must troll through. Precision is the measure of how many of these hits are actually relevant. Typically most people use the first page in the search result to measure this since most people wont’ even bother to go past the first page move on to page.

Content Management and Enterprise Search are kissing cousins, but how can you make them really sing together? This session will provide a deep dive and best practices into how to best use search with ECM with SharePoint 2010. We will show how to optimize findability in different scenarios, including discovery and hold; how to combine search across active and archived content and across ECM as well as other sources; how to improve tagging and determine content migration priorities using search for visibility; and much more. If you are planning a complex ECM initiative (or in the midst of one), this session is for you.