New SharePoint 2010 Auto Tagger Extension Jump-Starts Migration Projects With Rule-Based Content Classification

Online, November 17, 2010 (Newswire.com) - Organizations are slowly waking up to the enormous value that social knowledge networking can unlock. With the newly released Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 now Collaborative Knowledge Management (CKM) and Social Networking becomes a cost-effective approach to enabling organizational intelligence in the enterprise. Tagging based on managed metadata now can drive navigation, discovery, relation, and re-usability of content. Managed metadata also provides a common corporate vocabulary and can connect people to social networks. But these great features however completely rely on amount and precision of tagged content items and documents.

By default SharePoint 2010 offers a manual tagging feature only. "The initial content tagging process required for thousands of documents definitely lowered user acceptance in our migration projects", explains Frank Daske, Business Development Manager at Layer2. "The potential benefit of the new features can hardly be obtained by means of manual tagging. That's why we have created the Auto Tagger extension."

Auto Tagger for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 completely automatically categorizes SharePoint items and documents in background using taxonomy-based managed metadata or terms organized in the term store. Tag rules, item or document properties, metadata, the information store context and textual document contents are considered with the auto-classification. Auto Tagger could be helpful for initial tagging, e.g. after content migration from any system to SharePoint 2010, and for daily background operation. List items are processed as well as enterprise documents and files located in SharePoint libraries. A high quality of subject classification can be achieved using a high performance completely Microsoft .NET Framework based rule engine. Rule-based classification is much faster, less expensive to implement, and produce reliable, reproducible results with higher accuracy compared to linguistic and statistical approaches. Existent IFilters are used for content analysis, e.g. for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF and many more. The add-on is seamlessly integrated with the default SharePoint tagging process. Manually assigned tags are kept untouched. There are flexible background operation settings to adjust to customer requirements. The open API allows existing 3rd party solutions for text-mining, rule generation etc. to plug in. You may also tag any external data source to use with the SharePoint Knowledge Management and Social Networking features without any restrictions with the help of the Business Data List Connector for SharePoint. Auto Tagger is a component of the new Knowledge Management Suite for SharePoint 2010.

The Knowledge Management Suite for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 encourage knowledge workers to take advantage of the new SharePoint 2010 features by making it as easy as possible to manage tags, tag content and use tags for knowledge browsing, navigation, content discovery and search. The suite consists of several components, e.g. for improved taxonomy management, content based tag suggestions, auto tagger and metadata navigation Web Parts. The Tag Navigation Web Part harvests the value of collaborative tagging by using the SharePoint 2010 managed metadata taxonomy tree directly for content discovery and navigation. The Tag Directory Web Part renders managed metadata as A-Z directory index or enterprise glossary, to alphabetically browse the corporate knowledge. The Related Content Web Part for SharePoint 2010 automatically displays related content context-based by using existing tags - for example related products or services, assigned file downloads, context-driven contact information, tasks, events etc. The solution was developed 100% based on the new Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Server Enterprise Metadata Management API.

In cooperation with WAND, Inc - one of the leading providers of enterprise taxonomies - Layer2 additionally offers pre-defined Taxonomy Metadata for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, a robust and expanding library of taxonomies covering a wide variety of domains to help jumpstart classification projects. Taxonomy Metadata for Microsoft SharePoint 2010 is currently available for more than 40 specific topics in 13 languages on www.layer2.de/en.