Make term set available to site collections in SharePoint

Once we create the term set in SharePoint managed metadata, we can make that available to all the site collection in the web applications or specific site collections. We can do that by the steps shown below,

Navigate to site settings and click on Term store Management in Site Administration section.

Right click on the term set that we want to make available to all the site collections, and click on Move Term Set.

In the Term Set Move dialog box, click on the global term set that to move and click on Ok button.

To make available for only specific site collections, In the Site Collection Access section we have to enter the URL of the site collection we want to make the term set available. 

Share Point 2013 - managed meta data - Basics

All of you heard about metadata, that is data about the data. While learning share point by hearing the word meta data, thought it was a complex topic and need to check a lot (books or blogs) to understand the concept. But after going through some blogs realized that it is not that much complex topic. for simple understanding about metadata, take a company- company will have Name, Owner, Services (type of services provided by the company), Company site url..etc. All these attributes are called as metadata for company. 

In SharePoint context, Document library- document will have Title, Author, Created date, Edited date..etc. All these attributes are displayed as columns in document library. 

Why metadata?
If we don't have metadata, there is no way to describe and search for a document. For example we want to search a document "contracts", we can access the document by searching by name "contracts". We can use metadata to make search easier. For security and retention also we need metadata. If meta data managed correctly every thing will be fine, without proper organization of metadata things will not work as expected in share point.

meta data allows keywords to describe content, allows tagging to blog posts, folder. That makes search easier . For a document, by default all the metadata will not be shown. Administrator has permissions to change the view of document. By changing the view users can see the meta data associated with the items. Addition to the default metadata, we have options to add custom meta data by adding custom columns. These custom columns will give more information for the user.

In death- managed meta data:-
Term is a word or a phrase associated with an item.
Term store is a database that hosts the taxonomies(terms)
Term set- second level of a taxonomy or logical grouping of related items.
Managed meta data- terms and term sets created and managed independently from the columns can be treated as managed metadata.

Local Term sets are created with in the site collection.collection. For example if we added a column to a document library, created a term set and assigned term set to the column. The new term set is local to the site collection which contains the document library.

Global term sets are created out side of the site collection  Term store administrator will create new term set group as "School" and assign an user to that group as manager. Group manager would create term sets and relates to the School, Such as Students details and subjects in school term set group.

Generally, SharePoint users can only see the global term sets and term sets local to the current user's site collection.

Managed terms, are defined by the users who have appropriate permissions and organised as hierarchy.

Enterprise keywords, are words or phrases that were added to the share point items.

Both Managed terms and enterprise keywords will be saved in a data base called term store.

These are the basic concepts in share point managed meta data. I'll post more on how to configure managed meta data in share point 2013 and creating terms and term sets in share point 2013. 

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