Last week, when my organization was planning to update our SharePoint Server from 2013 to 2016, there were so many questions which arose during our conversation.

Here are some important questions for which we tried to find answers –

Q. Why is Metadata important for SharePoint files?

A. Metadata makes it simpler to recognize the data, manage it, and retrieve information from it. With the help of metadata, you can easily find a document from the item list. Metadata helps you to organize better and sort list or library items. So, by looking at the files in the list, you can easily recognize their status, date created, date modified, and size.

Q. How will we tag metadata?

A. Metadata helps in more efficient content search. When efficiently used, metadata makes content search easier for organizations. But it is essential for users to tag documents religiously.

Q. Does governance policy affect metadata?

A. As metadata tagging is considered as the responsibility of end users, the SharePoint administrator neglects the governance policy for the metadata. Also, most of the business organizations do not have enough awareness about the metadata. Only more than 20 percent of businesses use the metadata effectively.

It is essential for administrators to make end users aware of the importance of metadata. With the use of metadata, the SharePoint data becomes more manageable. So, it helps organizations to increase productivity and meet the business requirements.

Q. Will Managed Metadata Service will be useful?

A. Managed Metadata Service is used to create some predefined terms for SharePoint data which will be used throughout the environment. To tag SharePoint files, end users will be choosing metadata from these predefined ones. This makes metadata more manageable in the SharePoint environment.

Technically speaking, it is implemented by a service application and runs on the application and front-end server roles. Metadata connections maintain the connection between managed metadata and the application.

As we were planning SharePoint 2013 to 2016 migration, all these questions were rigorously asked, and our SharePoint administrator was quite sure about the usefulness of metadata in the SharePoint environment. As we understood the benefits of metadata, then all of us were sure that we would surely be using metadata more effectively in the SharePoint environment.

Benefits of metadata in SharePoint

Document Management

Document management in SharePoint becomes much easier and manageable with the help of metadata. You can easily find, filter, and sort documents based on the metadata value which is a special characteristic of the file. SharePoint applies some metadata to the file by default, like the date and time. You can also tag other characteristics based on your convenience.

Document management in SharePoint becomes much easier and manageable with the help of metadata. You can easily find, filter, and sort documents based on the metadata value which is a special characteristic of the file. SharePoint applies some metadata to the file by default, like the date and time. You can also tag other characteristics based on your convenience. Faster file searching

Metadata helps you to find your SharePoint file with ease. So, it increases the efficiency of data management.

Migration of SharePoint metadata

To migrate SharePoint data along with metadata, you cannot rely on a manual process because it will take too much time and you may need to tag the metadata to each file manually. Kernel Migrator for SharePoint is one such tool which lets you breathe easy about metadata migration as it has a special feature where you can choose to migrate metadata along with complete data. Also, SharePoint Migration tool is a highly useful, if you want to upgrade your SharePoint to a higher version. Note: Pre-upgrade Check and Considerations Before migration

Conclusion

With some familiarity with the SharePoint environment, one can easily understand the value of metadata for efficient document management in SharePoint. As there is no easy method to migrate file and its metadata together, you need to rely on professional migration solutions like Kernel Migrator for SharePoint for this purpose.