Open and closed terms in Managed Metadata

As you will know, term sets allow users to create collections of terms, which it can be reuse to associate content. In this case, usually, the SPO admin or the site owner prepopulate the Term set for all the users. But what happen when we have created a term set and we want to allow the users to add their own values into an specific term set?

In one hand, we can talk about open and closed term sets, by default, term sets are closed, so the term manager, must create the term and users will need to use them. There is no possibility to add new terms

On the other hand, we have open term sets, in this case we allow users to add their own values to the term set from input forms, it’s like to say: Ok, I’m allowing to create new terms on the fly

This option is quite great, but you have to be careful, because this option probably will not fit with your SharePoint governance strategy…

 

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Managed Metadata terms not updating

We were working in a project where we had to working in a multicultural language, in this case we were using Spanish and English. The problem was that we had several metadata terms in the store, but only it were in one language (in Spanish), so we add more terms to have the English translation, but when we try to switch the language it always showed the terms in Spanish and not in English, so I had to discover what is happening.

First of all, I tried to run manually the job “Taxonomy Update Scheduler ” but it did nothing, so I tried to access to the Taxanomy Hidden list to see what was happening.

To those people who do not know how to access to the Taxonomy Hidden list, navigate to: [site url]/Lists/TaxonomyHiddenList/AllItems.aspx

The list by default has read access to all NTAuthenticated users. Make sure to verify this when your users have issues with using the metadata taxonomy service.

Also, the list contains only the taxonomy terms that were actually used anywhere in your site collections. That means when you are using a taxonomy term for the first time in any list, that term gets added as a new list item in the taxonomy hidden list.

This list contains the following fields to store the data about the taxonomy terms:

As you can see, it appears two time the same term in different languages (1033 and 3082), so the problem was there. There is a method to update the terms in the Taxanomy hidden list?

The answer is yes, and you guess it right the method is: PowerShell! So we need to execute the following code:

$siteurl=”yourappweburl”

Get-SPWebApplication $siteUrl | Get-SPSite -limit ALL | foreach {
[Microsoft.SharePoint.Taxonomy.TaxonomySession]::SyncHiddenList($_)

}

Once this code has been executed, we need to refresh the browser and access again to the same term, and voilà we have the terms updated.

If you want more info please refer the following links:

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/kaushalendra/2012/10/16/how-to-sync-taxonomy-hidden-list-using-powershell/
https://prashobjp.wordpress.com/2013/09/30/updating-sharepoint-managed-metadata-term-hidden-value/
http://sharepoint-relieved.blogspot.com.es/2014/09/taxonomy-update-scheduler-not-working.html

Till the nex time!

How to change the Content Type Hub URL

If you are like me and have trouble typing then one thing that you might have done when setting up your Content Type Hub is to either make a spelling mistake in the Hub Url or simply copy the URL and get the Home.aspx at the end of it.

Of course this will now not work but there is no actual way to change this through the Central Administration UI, as has been mentioned in a couple of blog posts

Then when you try to publish out the Content Types you will get an error as you don’t have a valid proxy configured.

However you can actually change the Hub URL through powershell by using:

Set-SPMetadataServiceApplication -Identity "<ServiceApplication>" -HubURI "<HubURI>"

When you try to do this you get this rather scary message:

 

This is SharePoint telling you that this is a major thing so be careful! Essentially all your content types that you have published out will be removed if they can, and you have to replish all of your content types out again which can cause some issue.

But we can see now that the URL has changed and after everything settles down we can publish out again

One more thing make sure that you update the Service Connection as well to consume the content types

But it is an option, otherwise the only thing that you can do is create another Managed Metadata Service Application

Create Managed Metadata Service Application via Powershell in SharePoint 2013

In this article, we will go through the steps to create Managed Metadata. The steps are fairly simple but this is one piece which requires thorough planning based on the Organization’s taxonomy if defined great if not plan.

There are four steps which are:

1) Plan whether to use a dedicated application pool or a shared one based on various factors

To find out the application pool’s exists in your environment, try this in SharePoint PowerShell Management Console

Get-SPServiceApplicationPool

To get the list of managed accounts,

Get-SPManagedAccount

To create a new application pool with dedicated managed service account:

New-SPServiceApplicationPool -Name ManagedMetaDataAppPool -Account contosomanagedmetadata_svc

If you intend to use an existing app pool, change the name below.

2)  Create the Managed Metadata Service Application:

New-SPMetadataServiceApplication -Name “MetadataServiceApp” -ApplicationPool “ManagedMetaDataAppPool” -DatabaseName “MetadataDB”

3) Create the Managed Metadata Service Application Proxy

New-SPMetadataServiceApplicationProxy -Name “MetadataServiceProxy” -ServiceApplication “MetadataServiceApp”

4)  Configure the Service Application Association:

Add Managed Metadata in Service Application Association with the required Web Application. There is a Power Shell to do this shall to accomplish this will update the article at some other time