Challenge
International IDEA is an intergovernmental organization that supports sustainable democracy worldwide. They use MetaShare to store and manage their documents and metadata. One of the challenges they faced was to keep track of the terms that were created in SharePoint’s term store, especially the keywords term set, which is used to tag documents with relevant topics.
They needed a solution that would allow them to see all the newly created terms in a term set on a weekly basis, so that they could maintain them in a structured way. They also wanted to know who created the terms, in which workspace, and how many documents were tagged with them.
Solution
Ways, a leading SharePoint and Office 365 consultancy, developed a custom workflow for International IDEA, using Azure Function. The workflow runs on a weekly basis and generates a report of all the terms in a selected term set, with the following information:
- The term’s label
- The term’s path (if it is a child of another term)
- The term’s id
- The term’s term group
- The term’s term set
- The id of the term’s term set
- When the term was created (approximated by the date when the workflow runs)
- Who created the term
- The workspace where the term was created
- The number of documents that are tagged with the term
The report is available in a SharePoint list, where IDEA can create views and filters to see the terms that they want to monitor. They can also export the report to Excel, if needed.
Result
With this solution, International IDEA can easily and efficiently manage their SharePoint terms, ensuring that they are consistent, relevant, and up-to-date. They can also use the report to analyse the usage and impact of their terms, and to improve their document management and search capabilities.