SharePoint is a complicated application, at times I get frustrated but other times I get impressed by the depth and capabilities of the system. This week I had to research and handle two key aspects of SharePoint 2010

1) Tagging

2) Search Results

I was really frustrated to realised during a client demo that the search results were not working on a fresh install of SharePoint 2010, after a little bit of investigation  I realised that it was a simple action of indexing the contents in SharePoint 2010 and setting an Indexing Schedule.

This is how it is done

Navigate to CA, Service Applications, Search. You will see a link to your Content Sources. If you edit that it will give you the opportunity to setup a schedule for both Full and Incremental indexing. You can kick off a full drawl, once completed you will have results if everything is configured correctly.

Tagging is one of the Social Software features that has been out there for some time but from my experience very few people use it and find it useful. From my understanding its more the issue of not fully understanding how tagging can support findability and serendipity rather than the feature itself. Tagging is one of the many ways that search becomes a richer experience.

SharePoint puts a very interesting twist to tagging by distributing it into

1) Managed Terms

2) Enterprise Keywords

Managed Terms are how you manage enterprise Taxonomies using Term Sets. These allow key features like hierarchies and moderation ( Make the use of Terms compulsory for specific content columns )

Folksonomies  are unstructured and managed using Enterprise keywords.

Distribution of tagging into these key concepts allows a much richer use of tagging and brings home tagging to the enterprise.  Please read Managing Metadata in SharePoint 2010 to get a detailed view of this SharePoint 2010 feature .