Tag, you’re It! Making the Most of Metadata

Tag, you’re it! Making the most of metadata

Organization and classification has always stood at the forefront for business success. Information Governance requires commitment and a deep understanding of your businesses corporate culture, policies and procedures, and legacy data. Such knowledge only strengthens business structures increasing business performance.

Metadata is one hot topic. Listen to any programmer, computer documentary, or visit any information blog (Including ours!) and you will find metadata information and best practices. If you are managing content of any sort it is important to have a metadata plan. This helps businesses manage and successfully harness company knowledge. Whether it is digital assets, data, or even text, having the right metadata schema can help you support process, technology, and even company goodwill.

It is the norm for Records Managers, Document Controllers, and Network administrators to be actively engaged in DAM (digital asset management) or CMS systems (Content Management Systems). Share Drive cleanup, ECM (Enterprise Content Management), and SharePoint migrations are potential projects these departments may execute. Integrating a metadata plan into these projects strengthens organization and classification between company departments.

Let’s take a step back, what is Metadata? 

Metadata is pretty simple. It is data about data assets. Basic metadata elements include:

  • Document type
  • Name of file
  • File owner
  • Date modified
  • Date created
  • Size of file

These metadata elements are then “tagged” or applied to specific files. Metadata can be used for search engines, archiving, and grouping information.

Metadata can also be customized to benefit specific security classifications and permissions based on file paths and location. FileFacets allows users to develop relationships between metadata elements and file groups- also known as relational Metadata, streamlining the attribution process. Auto-Attribution also optimizes project timelines as metadata inheritance and relational metadata can be conducted simultaneously.

Classify Your Documents the Right Way 

It is important metadata plans are functional and user friendly. Our overall information governance goal is to provide efficient, optimizing business practices. Applying appropriate metadata harnesses the power of technology!