This blog has always been focused on providing a fundamental understanding of managing records and information in a SharePoint environment, so I don’t typically like to get too deep into the technical aspects of SharePoint very often. (And besides, isn’t that why you pay your System Administrators and SharePoint developers the mega-bucks?)
However, the new managed metadata services application in SharePoint 2010 is so powerful and so important to how we will manage content and records for a long time to come that I really believe it’s worth understanding at a deeper level. So, before we get to explaining how Term Stores and Enterprise Keywords are created in later posts, let’s look at what a Service Application is and how a managed metadata service application is created.
MOSS 07′s resource sharing architecture is based on something called Shared Services Providers (SSPs). SSPs work well for smaller deployments, but unfortunately they don’t provide the extensibility that one would expect to see in an enterprise-level content and records management solution. This limitation is a contributing factor to many of the complaints you will hear that SharePoint is not designed with future growth in mind.
SharePoint 2010 replaces the SSP architecture in MOSS 07 with Service Applications. Unlike SSPs, Service Applications are individual services that can be configured independently and provide resource sharing across sites running in different web applications and even in different farms.
Metadata in SharePoint 2010 is managed through a Service Application. This provides the centralized management of metadata I discussed in this earlier post.
To create a managed metadata service application, log into Central Administration and select Manage service applications under Application Management. From the Service Application tab, select New from the Ribbon, and click on Managed Metadata Service.
The ‘Create New Managed Metadata Service’ page will open:
Enter a Name for the service, your farm’s Database Server and the Database Name. Next, select whether the service will use Windows or SQL authentication (don’t worry about making this decision, your Database Administrator will know which option applies to you).
If you have a SQL failover, enter the name of the database server in the Failover Server box.
Application Pools define a set of web applications that share one or more processes. Essentially, they provide boundaries between processes so that a Web site or application in one pool will not be affected by application problems in other pools. You’ll have to consult with your IT folks on this, but you’ll want to decide if you should use an existing application pool for the new service or create a new one.
Finally, you’ll want to decide if the new managed metadata service should also provide access to a Content Type Hub, so it can share content types with the site. This can be a very effective way to manage both your content types and your related term store.
Now click on OK and your new managed metadata service is created:
In my next post, I’ll show you how to leverage the new service to create a new term store.
