I’m at the Microsoft SharePoint conference this week and it’s all about SharePoint 2010. It seems to be a huge release for Microsoft with a wide range of new features for end-users, IT pros and developers. I took in the general keynotes yesterday and then finished the day at the “ECM for the Masses” presentation. Because our focus is on metadata I was especially pleased with this last presentation that started to dig into all of the new metadata features and how they can be used for document and information management.

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Microsoft is really embracing the use of metadata in SharePoint 2010. There are a number of new features that help the user generate valid metadata and help users more effectively search and filter information in SharePoint based on this metadata. I won’t be able to cover all the new stuff here, but will be covering this in more detail over the coming weeks and months.

I guess the most important new feature is what Microsoft is calling Managed Metadata Services. This is a service that can be activated via Site Settings that allow organizations to define their metadata structure and the metadata that is valid for use within SharePoint. This defined SharePoint taxonomy can be hierarchical if it fits the organization. Users can quickly navigate the tree when creating content to assign relevant metadata. The Managed Metadata Service is an Enterprise service. A configured metadata service can be used to provision metadata across multiple farms in the organization. As single document ibrary can consume from multiple metadata providers.

The metadata can be assigned to documents both within SharePoint, but also directly within Office 2010 documents using the properties features in Office 2010 Backstage. Within the properties in Backstage a user can click on a SharePoint custom column name (e.g Project) and then navigate the SharePoint metadata tree to assign the properties.

In addition to the managed metadata service, Microsoft is also embracing folksonomies or ad-hoc metadata in SharePoint 2010. Users can add their own tags to information. This can be done in document libraries but also in the new social media features such as wikies, blogs etc. SharePoint will keep track of these tags and make them available next time a user wants to assign a tag. SharePoint tracks all these add-hoc tags as well as the managed metadata in what they are calling “SharePoint Keywords”.

So what is so great about all of these new metadata features? Well it’s how they can be used that’s powerful. Microsoft has introduced the concept of “navigators” in SharePoint 2010 that will allow users to find information very quickly. These navigators can appear in a left hand pane of SharePoint. By clicking on metadata tags or by navigating a metadata hierachy in the navigator, the user can narrow down the scope of the information they are looking at in SharePoint. For instance the user could navigate to Finance metadata, and then perhaps to mergers, to find all of the documents that have been tagged as “merger” in the document library. This is great stuff for e-discovery also