Managed metadata is a new feature in SharePoint 2010 which allows users to store centralized metadata terms. Terms in SharePoint can be managed centrally and used anywhere on the site allowing your users to hold enterprise-wide metadata.
Once in the system, managed metadata frequently needs to travel between staging, development, and production environments. With PowerShell, you will be able to reliably configure metadata stored on all of your environments without incurring a significant downtime.
Currently, there is no alternative out-of-the-box user interface allowing administrators to export metadata terms, which makes PowerShell a perfect candidate to perform such tasks automatically, without requiring significant development.
Assuming you have already set up your virtual development environment as described in Chapter 1, PowerShell Scripting Methods and Creating Custom Commands, we'll get right into...