Friday, June 18, 2010

Open-Closed Term Sets & Terms in SharePoint 2010

The 'Move Term Set' action for term store management, in combination with Restricted and Full permissions settings for the Managed Metadata Service, can be used to enforce the Open-Closed principle for adding new term sets to your taxonomy. Allow local taxonomy managers to add column specific term sets (open for extension) in local site-collections, but do not give them full permissions on the core term store (closed for modification). Then have a policy for periodically reviewing local site-collection term sets to incorporate useful new ones into the shared core term store.


Note that each term set also have an open-closed setting for controlling if new terms can be added to the term set or not. Users with restricted or full permissions are allowed to add new terms to open term sets, users with read permissions are not. Use the combination of open + restricted to enforce the "open for extension, closed for modification" policy for term set terms.

Note that access to the term store is granted per web-application using the app-pool account, not per user or group.  In addition, you can control permissions on each term group using the "contribute" and "manage" settings for granting rights to users and groups. If users are not granted contribute rights, they will be restricted to read even if the web-application's MMS connection permissions allows for more than just read.

Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Content Type Hub Publishing and Column Specific Term Sets in SharePoint 2010

In SharePoint 2010, you realize your taxonomy using the content type hub and term store provided by the Managed Metadata Service (MMS). The hub contains site content types built from site columns, and the "Managed Metadata" column type is what you use to connect term sets to a field. When adding a managed metadata column, you must choose between "Use a managed term set" defined in the MMS using Central Admin, or "Customize your term set" which allows you to create a new column specific term set on the fly.

Column specific term sets that you create will by default be assigned to the site-collection hosting the site content type gallery in which you create the site column. Such term sets will not be visible in the Term Store Management Tool in Central Admin, even if the MMS connection is set as the default storage location for column specific term sets. This also applies to column specific term sets created in the content type hub.

Do not create column specific term sets in a content type hub, this will break the content type publishing. If you click "Manage publishing for this content type" you will get this error:
The current content type contains a managed metadata column that uses a customized term set that is not available outside the current site collection. Please change the column setting or remove the column and publish the content type again.
There is, however, a third option in addition to the two suggestions; moving the term set from the site collection term group to a shared term set group in the managed metadata service term store.


Move the term set, then verify that the content type publishing setting is Republish in the content type hub. In Central Admin, run the "Content Type Hub" job first, then all applicable "Content Type Subscriber" jobs to execute the actual publish-subscribe process. Finally, open the site content types inventory in a subscriber site-collection and verify the subscribed content type, site column and term set.

I also recommend updating the site column definition to use the "use a managed term set" setting after moving the term set into the core term store.

Saturday, June 12, 2010

SharePoint 2010 Intra-Farm Term Store Syndication

The managed metadata service in SharePoint 2010 makes it simple to realize an enterprise taxonomy across all site-collections in a farm, or even across farms. In addition, the managed metadata service (MMS) application can be syndicated, that is, you can have multiple instances of the MMS and they can all be consumed in combination as one by web-applications. You can have multiple instances of the other service application types, but only one of them can be the active default association in a consuming web-application.

The Managed metadata service application overview on Technet used to have a nice example scenario of managed metadata term store and content type syndication across multiple departments in a company, in the page published on April 16th. As the example scenario has been removed in the page published on May 12th, the following figure shows the MMS syndication example:


For those of you who speak Spanish, or want to run it through Google translate, the managed metadata syndication example is still available here: http://technet.microsoft.com/es-es/library/ee424403.aspx

The salient point of the example is that the HR, IT, Products and Legal departments all share a common base term store and content type hub, allowing for the Products department to extend the base with its own term store and content types, and allowing the Legal department to have its own private term store while syndicating both the Global and Products managed metadata services.

An important detail in the example is that the Legal department uses term sets to represent confidential information. Therefore, it requires its own term store that prohibits other departments from seeing the confidential terms, even as new terms and term sets are added. Thus, the Legal department requires its own default term set location to prevent new confidential terms being added to the Global and Products managed metadata services.


This scenario is quite possible to realize as the two managed metadata service connection setting Default keyword location and Default term set location allows for specifying per MMS connection if this is the MMS term store where new keywords and column specific term sets will be added. However, as these options are set on the "Managed Metadata Service Connection" proxy itself rather than on the web-application "Service Application Associations" settings, there is a problem for the example scenario.

All web-applications in a farm share all service applications, connection proxies and proxy groups defined in the farm. The example scenario requires the IT, HR, Products and Legal web-applications to all be connected to the "Global Managed Metadata" service. As indicated by the red markup in the above figure, the web-apps require a different setting for default term set location - Legal requires "no", the others "yes". Thus, they cannot use the same MMS connection, a second connection is needed. However, you cannot add another local service application connection from Manage Service Applications, only cross-farm connections can be created from Central Admin .

The solution is to use PowerShell to add a new Managed Metadata Service Connection with the command New-SPMetadataServiceApplicationProxy using the -ServiceApplication parameter, rather than the -Uri parameter used for cross-farm connections.

 New-SPMetadataServiceApplicationProxy -Name "MMS_PX001" -ServiceApplication "MMS2" 

Some other parameters are:
-DefaultKeywordTaxonomy: This service application is the default storage location for keywords.
-DefaultSiteCollectionTaxonomy: This service application is the default storage location for column specific term sets.
-ContentTypeSyndicationEnabled: Publish content types from the content type hub.
-ContentTypePushdownEnabled: Push-down updates from the content type hub to subscribers.
-DefaultProxyGroup: Add this connection to the service application associations [default] proxy group.

Don't add your custom MMS syndication connections to the default proxy group as you will need to configure the service application associations per web-application that subscribes to a syndicated set of managed metadata services, typically using the [custom] proxy group. Additional custom proxy groups can be created in the farm using the New-SPServiceApplicationProxyGroup PowerShell cmdlet.


Note that as there are two term set "default" settings, there are four possible combination of MMS connection configurations for terms. Thus, four MMS connection variants must be created to cover all possible scenarios per managed metadata service instance. Then, each web-application can use its own service application associations [custom] proxy group to pick the applicable set of MMS connections.

Make sure that each proxy group has only zero or one default keyword location and default term set location. Having zero for either will prevent users from adding new keywords or new term sets. Having multiple defaults for either will cause an error as SharePoint cannot know in which of the locations to add new keywords and new term sets.

A final note about term store permissions: Access to the term store is granted per web-application using the app-pool account, not per user or group.  In addition, you can control permissions on each term group using the "contribute" and "manage" settings for granting rights to users and groups. If users are not granted contribute rights, they will be restricted to read even if the web-application's MMS connection permissions allows for more than just read.

[UPDATE] This scenario will make incremental crawl of friendly URLs (FURL) fail in SP2013; and if you contact Microsoft Support you will get help from people who don't understand proxy groups, default proxy/MMS connection, default keyword location and default column-specific term set location settings, who will tell you that the product group confirms that the documented scenario on Technet is in fact not supported. Stay away from using SharePoint for anything else than a single department collaboration scenario, SP2013 is not built for real-life enterprise usage.

Wednesday, June 09, 2010

Customizing SharePoint 2010 My Sites

A nice improvement on My Sites in SharePoint 2010 is that all of the My Site content and pages except "My Content" is now provided by the My Site Host site-collection, and not as in SharePoint 2007 where all except the public profile page UserDisp.aspx was provided by each user's personal site-collection.


This makes it much simpler to customize the content, links, web-parts, and look and feel of My Sites in 2010. Just customize the shared pages in the My Site Host such as "My Profile" and "My Newsfeed", save/deploy and the changes will immediately affect all My Sites. No more hassle of pushing the profile customizations to thousands of personal site-collections. Note that the "Tags and Notes", "Colleagues" and "Memberships" are stored in the /_layouts/ folder and are application pages, not web-part pages, and as such are not easily customized.

Any customization needed for "My Content" will still depend on e.g. feature stapling or master page delegate controls to push the changes to each personal site.

See Customizing My Sites in Microsoft SharePoint 2010 on the SharePoint Social Computing team blog for an overview of My Site customization options. See also the 1h42m web-cast Customizing My Sites and Social Features in SharePoint 2010.