CHAPTER 3 The Magic of Metadata If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, looks like a duck, it must be a duck. --Proverb The single most important task of a SharePoint system is to find information. You may be looking for relevant news about your organization, the policy document that describes the process for hiring a new employee, or the proposal you wrote last year that you now desperately need to find because the customer has decided to move forward with the project. In all of these cases, quickly and easily putting your hands on the information you need so you can do your job is the key driver behind almost all the SharePoint projects I have worked on. We have some pretty sophisticated tools for the creation of content--programs like Microsoft's Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. We also have a number of powerful ways of communicating with one another (like e-mail, Twitter, Yammer, Lync, etc.). But because electronic files seem to breed like rabbits and we have such a deluge of them, we have always had trouble figuring out how to organize our documents so we will be able to find them when we need them. If you've been alive long enough, you'll remember the color-coded labels we used to label floppy disks and the disk organizers we used so that we could find the one we needed when we were looking for a particular file. We then graduated to hard disks that held many thousands of files and we learned the metaphor of the filing cabinet: The drawer is the drive letter (e.g., "C:") and the disk file folders held documents. When each person had a separate "C drive," we were the only ones who had to navigate our folder hierarchies and, given time, we could often (not always) eventually find the document we knew was in there. We would share documents with others by "sneaker net," which meant copying the document to a floppy disk and delivering or shipping it to a recipient. Then the world of the networking was created, and groups of people were networked together and would share a common hard drive. Productivity was enhanced (no more sneaker net), but the world of document management became infinitely more complicated: People could create their own folders that were named and nested differently from what others were using; two people could attempt to update the same document at the same time, with the person saving last overwriting the work of the previous person, with no way to get the previous version back. The result was a mess--and it's been that way ever since (and getting worse) as the number of documents explodes and the methods for figuring out how to organize them has not moved forward. This chapter will discuss metadata: what it is and how it can be part of the solution to document findability. What Is Metadata? This question has a very simple answer, one that many people are familiar with: Metadata are data about data. A more rigorous definition can be found in Patrick Lambe's book Organizing Knowledge: "We define metadata as the collection of structured information about a document or a piece of content" (p. 37). 49