SharePoint Programming

Enterprise metadata management (EMM) is a set of features introduced in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 that enable taxonomists, librarians, and administrators to create and manage terms and sets of terms across the enterprise.

Managed Metadata Service

The managed metadata service is a service application that enables the use of managed metadata and allows you to share content types across site collections and across Web applications. The service publishes a term store and content types, and the metadata is consumed via the managed metadata connection. A managed metadata service and connection are created when the metadata service application is created.

Managed Metadata Service Application

Creating the service application requires the administrator to specify the database to be used as the term store. When you create new managed terms, or when users add managed keywords, these terms are stored in the database. Like other service applications, the managed metadata service can be published to provide access to other Web applications. When a service application is published, a URL to the service is created. The administrator of another Web application can create a connection to your service by using this URL.

In addition to sharing metadata, you can also use the managed metadata service to share content types. By creating a new managed metadata service and specifying a site collection as the content type hub, you can share all content types in the site collection’s content type gallery.

You can create multiple managed metadata service applications. This provides the capability to share multiple term stores and content types from multiple site collections. Each service must specify a different term store during the creation process, and a new database will be created if it does not exist.

Managed Metadata Service Connection

The connection provides access to the service. When you create a managed metadata service, a connection to the service is automatically created in the same Web application as the service. Web applications can have connections to multiple services. Several properties are specified as part of the connection. Values for each of these properties must be specified as part of configuring the service connection.

Default keyword location Specifies that the term store will be used to store new managed keywords. This provides the capability for sharing and managing a common set of keywords across site collections.

Default term set location Specifies where to store term sets when new site columns are created. This provides the capability for sharing and managing a common set of terms across site collections.

Use content types Makes content types associated with this managed metadata service available to users of sites in this Web application.

Push-down content type publishing updates from the content type gallery to subsites and lists by using the content type whether to update existing instances of the changed content types in subsites and libraries.