I’ll bet you didn’t know you had metadata… but you do. The shortcut meme would be: Meta is to data as Super is to natural. That is, Metadata is beyond data in that it is data that describes data. Now that I have you confused, let me try to unconfuse you a tad by providing a simple example.
Your Christmas CD may have “White Christmas” as a song turned into a data file that you can play. The label on the CD that tells you that this is Bing Crosby’s Christmas album is Metadata. Simple.
SharePoint 7 and Office 2007 work together to allow you to easily organize your documents using metadata in the form of ‘Document Information Panels.’ Metadata is hardly new to documents, but has been rarely used in the past. This has been because users were presented with the request to provide Metadata at the time they were saving the document. Nobody wants to answer a bunch of questions about what this is when they are saving it… at that point we are supposed to be done. One of the new twists, in an attempt to make the process easier, is using InfoPath to create custom panels that gather required information, in fields, about a particular document that runs off a template.
So, what to use it for?
One example might be, if we have access to participant case notes in an electronic format, to add Metadata fields, in a custom document information panel, that force the selection of a client about whom the notes are written, a date range that lists the dates of service and a reconciliation check box that allows a manager to note that the notes are complete and has been reviewed prior to the workflow moving on to billing.
This could be done in a word template managed by a document librarian, which in turn could be queried by a gadget on a VP’s home page to show the summary of a day’s work. Cool.
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