Creation of tag systems for news and documents
The system for categorizing news and documents shared on your SharePoint intranet.
Last updated
The system for categorizing news and documents shared on your SharePoint intranet.
Last updated
With tags, you can categorize contents such as news and documents uploaded to your SharePoint intranet. This helps users find such contents more quickly thanks to the filter function. In addition, you can configure webparts so that they display only contents belonging to specific categories.
Tags are created using the Term store management tool, which can be accessed from the SharePoint intranet site. Tags (also referred to as metadata) are terms belonging to term sets, which in turn belong to term groups. After creating term sets and terms, you need to go back to your SharePoint intranet and create columns of the Managed Metadata type, which allow you to apply tags to your contents.
To sum up, you need to take the following steps:
Create term sets and terms in the Term store;
Create Managed Metadata columns to assign metadata to your contents (news and documents);
Apply tags to your contents (news and documents).
These steps will be explained in detail in the following sections. Section 2 and 3 are divided into two sub-sections concerning documents and news respectively.
As this procedure requires high levels of permissions, it is recommended to perform it with an IT member.
First of all, you need to open the Term store, which is a section of the Site Administration area. To access the Term store, take the following steps:
Click on the Settings icon, then click on Site information.
Click on View all site settings.
Under Site Administration, click on Term store management.
You will land on the Term store, where you can create term groups, term sets and terms.
Let us assume that you want to divide a set of documents into categories corresponding to different Departments (e.g. Marketing, HR, IT, etc.). As a first step, you need to create a new global term group. A term group is a set of term sets that share common security requirements. To create a new term group, click the three dots to the right of the Taxonomy section. Then, click on Add term group.
Enter a name for your new term group and press Enter. You can simply write what type of content you are going to manage with the tags in this group.
For example, "Documents".
You can create a new term group only if you are a term store admin.
You can edit the group managers or contributors by clicking on Edit next to Group Managers. A panel appears, where you need to enter the names or email addresses of the people you want to add and assign them a role (either manager or contributor). When you are done, click on Save.
As a second step, you need to create a new term set. A term set is a group of related terms. To add a new term set, click the three dots next to the term group name, and select Add term set.
Enter a name for your new term set and press Enter. The name should correspond to the general topic to which the tags will be related.
For example: "Departments"
The term set name should not contain spaces. If the name you want to use includes more than one word, please use hyphens or capital letters without spaces. For example: DocumentTypes.
To add a term set, you must be a contributor, a group manager or a term store admin.
Finally, as a third step, you need to add terms (tags) to your term set. A term is a specific word or phrase within a term set, and it has a unique ID. To add a new term, click the three dots next to the term set name, and select Add term.
Enter a name for your term and press Enter.
For example: "Marketing".
Repeat these steps to add more terms, e.g. "HR", "IT", "Finance" and so on. If you need to delete a term, click the three dots next to the term name and select Delete term.
You can create multilingual tags. To add a translation, select the term you want to translate and, on the General tab, under Translations and synonyms, select + Add. The Add translation and synonyms panel appears. Select your language, type the translation, and click Save at the bottom left of the panel.
To create and manage terms, you must be a contributor, a group manager, or a term store admin.
If you want to use tags to categorize news, you need to follow the procedure described above. For example, let us assume that you want to divide the news published on your intanet into categories corresponding to different news types. To create these tags, you need to:
Access the Term store;
Create a new term group which could be named, for example, "News";
Create a new term set which could be named, for example, "NewsType";
Add terms to the term set, for example, "Corporate news", "Welcome", "HR", etc.
To apply tags to your news and documents, you need columns of the Managed Metadata type. Read the following section to learn how to do so.
After creating your tags, you need to open the library where the contents to be categorized are collected. Here, you need to create a Managed Metadata column, which will allow you to select and apply terms from a specific term set. The first part of this section explains how to create Managed Metadata columns to categorize documents, while the second part describes how to create Managed Metadata columns to categorize news.
First of all, open the document library where your documents are collected. Then, click on +Add column. A panel appears, showing you different column types: scroll down and select Managed metadata, then click Next.
The Create a column panel appears. The panel features a number of fields to fill in. The fields marked with an asterisk (*), i.e., Name and Term set or term, are mandatory. Fill in these fields as follows:
Name: enter the name of the column. If the name you want to use includes more than one word, please avoid spaces: use capital letters.
The column name should coincide with the name of the term set you are going to select.
Select term set or term: here you need to associate the colum with a term set. Click on Select to open the Select term set or term panel. This panel shows you the term groups available in the Term store. Click on the term group you are interested in and select the correct term set. Then, click on Save at the bottom left of the panel.
After the selection of a term set, the Default value field appears: here you can select or type a default value, i.e., a tag that will be automatically applied by default.
The Create a column panel also includes additional options which can be accessed by clicking on More options. Here you can set further options, such as:
Allow multiple values: if you enable this option, you will be able to apply more than one tag to a document.
Require that this column contains information: if you enable this option, it will be mandatory to add a value to this column.
When you have completed the panel, click on Save.
To edit a column, you need to select it (1), click on Column settings (2) and select Edit (3). By so doing, you will open the Edit column panel, which is identical to the Create column panel. When you have completed your changes, click on Save at the bottom left of the panel.
First of all, you need to access the page library where your news are collected. To do so, follow these steps:
Click on the Settings icon at the top right of the page, then click on Site contents.
Scroll down to the bottom of the page and select the Site Pages page library.
Now, add a new Managed Metadata column by taking the steps described in the previous sub-section concerning documents. First, you need to click on +Add column and select the Managed metadata column type. Then, click Next.
The Create a column panel appears. The panel features a number of fields to fill in. The fields marked with an asterisk (*), i.e., Name and Term set or term, are mandatory. Fill in these fields as follows:
Name: enter the name of the column. If the name you want to use includes more than one word, please avoid spaces: use capital letters.
The column name should coincide with the name of the term set your are going to select.
Select term set or term: here you need to associate the colum with a term set. Click on Select to open the Select term set or term panel, which shows you the term groups available in the Term store. Click on the term group you are interested in and select the correct term set. Then, click on Save at the bottom left of the panel.
After the selection of a term set, the Default value field appears: here you can select or type a default value, i.e., a tag that will be automatically applied by default.
The Create a column panel also includes additional options which can be accessed by clicking on More options. Here you can set further options, such as:
Allow multiple values: if you enable this option, you will be able to apply more than one tag to a news.
Require that this column contains information: if you enable this option, it will be mandatory to add a value to this column.
When you have completed the panel, click on Save.
You can edit a column by taking the steps described in the previous sub-section: select the column and click Column settings > Edit to open the Edit column panel, which is identical to the Create column panel. Make the necessary changes and click on Save at the bottom left of the panel.
Now you can use the Managed Metadata columns you created to apply tags to your contents. Read the following section to learn how to do so.
This section will show you how to assign metadata to news and documents by using the Managed Metadata columns you created previously, In particular, the first sub-section focuses on documents, while the second one concerns news.
To apply a tag to a document, take the following steps:
Select the document you want to categorize (1).
Click on the info icon at the top right of the page to open a panel containing information on this document (2).
This panel features the name of the Managed Metadata column you created previously (3). Click inside the box under the column name to apply a tag from the term set associated to the column. You can type the name of the tag and press Enter. Alternatively, you can click on the tag icon to view all the tags belonging to the term set and select the correct tag from the list.
After selecting the correct tag, click on Apply at the bottom left of the panel.
If you have activated the Allow multiple values option, repeat these steps to add more tags.
To apply a tag to a news, take the following steps:
Select the news you want to categorize (1).
Click on the info icon at the top right of the page to open a panel containing information on the news (2).
This panel features the name of the Managed Metadata column you created previously (3). Click inside the box under the column name to apply a tag from the term set associated to the column. You can type the name of the tag and press Enter. Alternatively, you can click on the tag icon to view all the tags belonging to the term set and select the correct tag from the list.
After selecting the correct tag, click on Apply at the bottom left of the panel.
If you have activated the Allow multiple values option, repeat these steps to add more tags.
After the selection of the tag, a yellow book icon appears next to the news title. This means that the news needs republishing. To republish the news, just hover your mouse over the icon. A window appears: click on Republish now.
You can assign metadata to a news also in the Page details panel in the news itself. The steps to follow are listed below:
Open the news.
Click on Edit at the top right of the page, and then on Page details on the left bar.
The Page details panel opens. This panel also features the name of the Managed Metadata column you created previously. The steps to take to apply metadata to the news coincide to those described above.
Click inside the box under the column name to assign a tag from the term set associated to the column. You can type the name of the tag and press Enter. Alternatively, you can click on the tag icon to view all the tags belonging to the term set and select the correct tag from the list.
After selecting the correct tag, click on Apply at the bottom left of the panel.
Finally, click on Update news at the top right of the page to republish the news.
