Applies to: SharePoint

I was experimenting with the tagging features of SharePoint 2010. Part of that experiment was adding an Enterprise Keywords column to my document library. After playing with it and realizing the Tag Cloud is nearly worthless, I don’t like the global nature of the keywords for our specific application, and I prefer the standard term set key filters portion of the managed metadata navigation to the Tags portion – I wanted to remove this feature.

So I went to Library Settings > Enterprise Metadata and Keywords Settings. This is the same place I turned it on. There were 2 checkboxes then to enable the Enterprise Keywords column and also to publish to social tags. I had just checked both when I wanted to turn it on and the column magically appeared in my library and content type. I assumed I would just uncheck this same box to remove it (hence the entire concept of a checkbox).

Unfortunately going to the page showed I could uncheck the bottom one to turn off social tag publishing but the Enterprise Keywords checkbox was disabled. Fortunately this was dev and I wasn’t too concerned, so I could experiment. The solution is pretty easy, but I’d have been wary to try it in production. So here it is if you are stuck in production and worried:

Just click on the Enterprise Keywords column in your list of columns and select delete. When you go back to the Enterprise Metadata and Keywords Settings page everything will be unchecked and you’re good to go. Obviously all that data will be lost on every item, but if you are disabling this feature you were probably cool with that anyway.