In this chapter, we will discuss one of the more powerful aspects of SharePoint—metadata. We're all familiar with the information we put into SharePoint, which takes the form of documents, spreadsheets, images, and so on. Metadata is detailed information about these documents and artifacts.

For example, a document might be about a particular business process, but the metadata about the document will include things such as the author's name, their department, the date the document was created or updated, the subject of the document, and keywords and phrases that we might use when searching for the document. Organizing and managing metadata will help your users to locate the resources they need more efficiently.

Configuring and using managed metadata brings a lot of advantages to a SharePoint environment:

• Consistency: Using...