I have been working on an integration that needs to read terms from SharePoint’s Managed Metadata service, for a particular field, and then populate that field with those values. All this has to be done via SharePoint’s web services – so the relevant ones here are the TaxonomyClientService, and Lists web service.
This has proved particularly bloody hard. Continue reading “Working with the TaxonomyClientService: Part 1 – What fields are there?”
Some of my colleagues are consultants who go out and try and design or generate SharePoint systems for customers. Naturally, they like to try and start from a blank starting point – so they use the ‘Blank Site’ template. However, they keep having problems with the Managed Metadata columns in such sites – in short, they don’t work. Continue reading “Why Blank root sites don't work with the Managed Metadata field”
Like many people, one of the things I found a little hard to adjust to was not using folders in SharePoint. I mean, you can, and they do have their place, but metadata and views is much more useful. However, now when I go out to customers I notice that a lot of them have a lot of difficulty letting go of using folders for everything. Continue reading “Yes, Folders in SharePoint do suck”
I recently got a lot of my old APS photos scanned, and I’ve been working my way through them all, trying to sort them out and arrange them. I’ve been doing this by, well, putting them in folders such as ‘2003-06 – French Alps Kayaking’. At the same time, though, I wanted to give my friends copies of the photo’s which they were in, and I did this by, well, creating another folder for each of them, and copying pictures into them too. Not dreadfully sophisticated.
A couple of my friends asked why I didn’t just use some albuming application, or something like Flickr, and tag the images. That way, I could browse by multiple criteria. And I’ve gotta say, it would be neat. However, I want to be able to look at these photos when I’m an old man. I mean, my grandfather was showing me pictures of when he was a kid – so that’s about 75 years ago. Does anyone consider 75 year survival times for digital media? Nope. But I suspect that file systems and JPEGs, even if they aren’t still in use, will be easier to migrate. Flickr? Well, obviously, no website has ‘Established 1932’ on it. I’m not sure I’d trust something like that to still be around. Other tagging and abluming products – again, I’m not convinced. I decided I’d stick with just folders.
This set me thinking about Record Management, and taxonomy vs tagging. Continue reading “Why SharePoint Records Management will struggle…”
Andy Burns' Blog 