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SharePoint technology is increasingly being used by companies and organizations, especially to simplify browser based collaboration with Microsoft Office over the Internet. With the fast growing amount of collaboration data, the need for additional features to quickly access information items and documents has never been greater. If the user has to rely on searching alone, then all the effort in locating information is down to them, and they often do not know the contents of the possibly existing repositories. Structuring the information in advance as a mandatory part of the content creation process assists the user before they even start spending their time on search.

By far the most common and effective method of finding information is browsing one or more structured classification systems, e.g. taxonomies.

Why taxonomies?

A taxonomy is a system of definitions that are used to describe, categorize, recognize, organize and manage information, to show how they interrelate. Hierarchical relationships (e.g. ‘parent-child’) and associative relationships (e.g. ‘see also’) capture the essence of a subject area by being described by a taxonomy. A taxonomy enables documents or other items to be classified and organized according to a category structure. It therefore enables users to access this documents more easily and also guides them in exploring a document collection by laying out the conceptual structure of the subject area and enhancing knowledge discovery. By far the most effective method of finding information is browsing a structured classification system. Thus a taxonomy makes it possible to describe

the structure of products and solutions a company offers,
the company’s organizational structure,
typical process tasks or life situations (e.g. my first day in the company, all documents about company's security policy)
time-based cross-list cross-site informations (e.g. all items that are new or changed in last month within one category)
geographical, language or subsidary-based information
Information for defined target groups like sales, development, students etc.

Additionally related information is displayed, e.g.

responsible sales and technical contact for a product,
related product sheets, available service documents,
associated events, training days or
connected tasks.

Scattered documents among isolated sites

From the Knowledge Manager's point of view SharePoint data often is difficult to manage, especially when the documents are scattered among different isolated pages or sites. The SharePoint navigation is based on a single hierarchical folder structure, which only allows content items to be classified with a single term. This causes problems if content logically relates to more than a single term and terms at different levels within a hierarchy. Navigation is difficult, often impossible. Frequently required information is totally inaccessible both for users and services (e.g. machines). Metadata, e.g. from Office documents, are saved - but not managed. In some areas, e.g. within the Public Sector, adherence to the use of predefined taxonomies to classify content is a mandatory compliance issue.

The SharePartXXL Taxonomy Extension for Microsoft SharePoint enables users to have different category-based views to their cross-site items, independent from it's location. These views can be by any topic, timebased (e.g. all new items in a category created last week), by author or by any other criteria. All usual view-based features are provided, including subscription by RSS and e-mail alerts.

With that extension the information inside a SharePoint portal can be transformed to knowledge and the portal becomes a place to share knowledge as well as content.

Products - Taxonomy Extension for Microsoft SharePoint - Intro

Products - Taxonomy Extension for Microsoft SharePoint - Intro

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SharePartXXL Taxonomy Extension for Microsoft SharePoint

Taxonomies - Intro and Background Information

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Taxonomies for SharePoint