Our Synaptica product enhancement strategy is to continuously develop useful and innovative ways for our clients to use Synaptica for their taxonomy and metadata management needs. So it wasn’t a surprise when some of our clients asked us to provide an ‘out-of-the-box’ integration point into SharePoint we know first hand about the issues with managing taxonomies in Sharepoint from our own internal experiences as well as multiple client engagements over the last few years.
Microsoft SharePoint has over one-hundred million licenses in place and its adoption continues to grow globally. In 2007 an IDC survey of 300 companies found 61% were deploying it enterprise-wide, and that 28% of those using the product in specific departments were expected to expand usage to the enterprise within the next 12 months- and a year later things don’t seem to be slowing down.
With that kind of adoption and penetration across so many industries, it is impossible to ignore the impact that SharePoint is having as a portal for information and document sharing both internally and externally to the enterprise. As a result, Synaptica is proud to announce an integration that addresses some of the known pain points that users have when trying to successfully use taxonomies within SharePoint to tag, search and discover documents and other content. With this Synaptica integration you can:
1) Import a complete vocabulary into SharePoint as a list: This feature provides for the import, and update, of a vocabulary (taxonomy, thesaurus, authority file, etc.) creating a new list which may then be applied as a column to be linked to content within a document library. As the vocabulary is updated within Synaptica, one may update the list stored in SharePoint to make sure that the most current information is being stored and applied as metadata to documents and content.
2) Provide Dynamic access to Synaptica allowing users to tag content : Employing Web Services this feature allows SharePoint to access a Synaptica system through the use of either a keyword search, or a navigable “tree browse” to allow users to find and locate specific terms and apply them as metadata. This dynamic access makes sure that users are employing standardized terminology to tag content, where at the same time these vocabularies may be used across the enterprise and in other applications.
3) Provide Dynamic access to Synaptica for search and discovery: A SharePoint Web Part allows users to search or browse real-time through Synaptica vocabularies – using the same terms that have been applied to tag the content. This feature also can “direct” users to the proper terminology, as opposed to their having to guess at how a piece of content might have been tagged using an uncontrolled, free-text method.
With this initial iteration of the Synaptica: SharePoint integration, we hope to solve some of the biggest problems we hear about with users trying to better organize, tag and discover content within a SharePoint portal. We will be looking at expanding the integration over time and adding improved features as we learn more about how we can assist our customers and SharePoint users with these integral tasks.
