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Mandatory metadata

AndyJS

Like many organisations I guess we have a lot of difficulties getting users to fill in metadata for their content. What solutions do other have for enforcing the completion of metadata?

Two solutions came to mind:
- to include the setting of metadata into a workflow following the content creation / editing, but the concern here is thatr users do not necessarily have to use the workflow,
- to incorporate the mandatory fields as additional fields in the DCTs, but the concern here is that as the fields are the same for each content type, this will lead to a requirement to keep all these in sync if we change the metadata fields required.

I'd be interested to hear how others have approached this problem.

We have TS v5.0.2 (upgrading to v6.1in next 3 months is the plan) but not Metatagger.

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Comments

gzevin

I'd suggest to forget the DCRs as Teamsite has its own metadat mechanism.

I am allowing only workflows to submit and they have a task that checks for the mandatory MD and bounces back if they are not there

Greg Zevin, Ph.D. Comp. Sc.
Independent Interwoven Consultant/Architect
Sydney, AU

AndyJS

True there is the "set metadata" functionality, although that has some in-built restrictions. For example the metadata fields cannot be dependent upon each other. For instance if you have a hierarchy of values, and that the values for field2 that are allowable are dependent on your selection for field1 (as we have a case for).

In any case, does the in-built functionality not just write the values as extended attributes from which the other processes can then use the metadata? The values could be written there using tpl code.

How do you enforce things such that submitting is only possible through workflows. We have a shared service here (each with their own needs). One other set of users need to have "Submit-Direct" available on the menu items. As this is available, as far as I can see any of the possible workflow options don't have a way of the users avoiding them altogether. Am I missing something?

Andy

Adam Stoller

On one side you're hitting a limitation of the customizability of TeamSite - it's not as granular in all places that everyone would like. You can specify customizations by role in most places, by user in many places, by group is some places, by branch / path in very few places.

Menus (custom or OOTB) can only be restricted based on role - which is not nearly flexible enough for a TS server being used to host multiple initiatives with different customization needs.

As for setting metadata via the metadata DCT vs. a templating DCT - there are pros and cons to both approaches - but the big positive for using a distinct metadata DCT comes when you are also using MetaTagger.

--fish
Senior Consultant, Quotient Inc.
http://www.quotient-inc.com

gzevin

I am answering both of you. Apart from having metadata as EAs, and defined in a global DCT being, one can also define an inline metadata set in a particukar DCT, and, whats more, one could make a 'metadata' DCR that is attached to any other Web asset (in part of our implementation here we have such an approach, which I think is a major overkill). One of great advantages of having metadata as EAs I think is the ability to assign metadata to multiple files. Also, in TS 6 metadata capture is much more integrated than it was before. As a drawback I think is the absence of a well defined API to acess structured metadata stored as EAs (Adam, if you remember, I did touch that issue before, and even Mark Hale has disappeared after I asked him that question).

As for the complexity of metadata fields - I am not sure one could use formAPI on metadata DCT - but it could be made as complex as you want to cater for different cases. I am with a major education department, and they are BIG on metadata. However, current capabilitied of teamSite do cater for their requirements (apart from the absence of an API)

as far as workflows and submit are concerned (BTW, Submit direct is gone in TeamSite 6, but there is a workflow that does the same task) - in our case we DO NOT allow anybody to deploy content unless it goes via workflow. In any organisation there are a couple (or a few) of power users/admins that *could* deploy without workflow. But I believe this is beyond TEamSite's capabilities and has to be managed separately.

Greg Zevin, Ph.D. Comp. Sc.
Independent Interwoven Consultant/Architect
Sydney, AU