“Five Myths about Taxonomy and SharePoint” is really a misnomer, as it is only one myth, with the promise of the other four in following articles.  It is a response to Jeff Carr’s previous article of the same name.

The myth written about in this article is that SharePoint now has taxonomy management.

“SharePoint has certainly made a major step up by embedding the taxonomy capability within SharePoint however it is missing most of the critical features which make taxonomies so useful. No related terms, management within the term store is so painful even Microsoft employees use an outside tool.”

The shortcomings of SharePoint’s taxonomy include: a very small set of allowed taxonomy attributes, nearly non-existent tracking of term changes, no synonyms, and a maximum of ten lines of display.  Due to all these limitations, many experts are recommending using a third party solution.

Although it is not mentioned specifically in the above article, the Semaphore Content Intelligence System from taxonomy leader Smartlogic is a solution to SharePoint taxonomy woes.  With Semaphore you can add taxonomy terms with a poly-hierarchy using consistent metadata and a stricter governance of an enterprise taxonomy.

Ken Toth

November 23, 2011