Thursday, October 25, 2007

SharePoint Tagging – why ?

SharePoint Tagging – why ? Or – why Bring Web 2.0 to SharePoint ?

The answer seems to be obvious – because it’s better!

For the last years, as the Internet evolved, we have seen some interesting trends – the last one we saw (at least one of them…) was “the rise of the Search”.
With the entrance of Google to the market of search engines, the importance of search solutions has become crucial – even to companies such as Microsoft, that found a sudden competition from an unexpected direction.
Suddenly – everyone can just search for a word or a phrase, and the results are there – quick and easy… this has been true for some time, but not in the organizational market.
It has proven to be too complex to manage an efficient search solution for the organization Intranet… too many data sources, too dynamic usage patterns, to many pieces of information that needs to be managed, sorted, indexed etc.

What did we have before ?
Before the search solution came to the game, we had hierarchical order. Every items was place inside a branch on a tree… one dimension of hierarchy, one “view” of information, and all our items can be sorted and found. Apparently – this solution wasn’t sufficient too… hierarchies need to changed here and there, different sorting and access is sometimes required for different users etc.

And so, what we saw on the internet – was the evolving of “Tagging” solutions .

“Tagging” means that you can add any item, locate it wherever you want, and simply by adding a “tag” to it, you can always locate this item, present and access it.



Well, at first, the tagging process should be the easiest thing to do for a user – and indeed it is: just choose a tag by clicking it from a list, and immediately the item is tagged… much simpler than locating a library of a folder on a document library.






Second – provide the users with the simplest tool to locate the tagged items and view those items – and this is the part of the solution called “Tag Cloud” – tag cloud simply presents a cloud of tags in a simple list, with a variable size per each tag according to its usage rate, so when a user choose a tag in the cloud, immediately all items tagged using the chosen tag are presented… again, this is the most simple way of locating information.












Conclusion
The tagging of items and the sorting of tagged items is currently the most convenient way of managing information and knowledge… more than this – as the “free” space of the internet has proven, users prefer this option – both when updating and when searching for information on blogs and WIKI sites.
So why not just provide them with this solution also for their SharePoint ?
Well – there is one by now…
SharePoint Tagging feature solution by KWizCom Corporation.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

How can I download this tagging solution for SharePoint??

Shai Petel said...

It will be available shortly at our web site:
http://www.kwizcom.com

see: http://www.kwizcom.com/ProductPage.asp?ProductID=517&ProductSubNodeID=522

for download

no na said...

it is available from our web site... www.kwizcom.com

Enjoy,
Uri

Amit Bajaj said...

Is it possible to use you tagging webpart with Discussion boards ??

P.S. Srikanth said...

Folks, I created 3 tag fields at site level (MOSS 2007) and added it to a list. Works great for capture of information. However, when I click on these tags from the "List View All Items", only the first tag field is able to show search results, while the other two tag fileds displays an empty search results screen - what is going on here? Please let me know.

Shai Petel said...

Best way for products support is to contact support at kwizcom.com by email.

Took me a while to see this comment, but checked now and all issues related to what you describe are long gone (fixed).

Feel free to download the newer version from our web site
http://www.kwizcom.com/ProductPage.asp?ProductID=517&ProductSubNodeID=518

dejibu said...

I'm testing the 64-bit evaluation copy of this add-on, and I'm encountering problems with sorting, filtering, grouping and indexing Tags field type columns. When I try to index the Tags field column, it doesn't show up in the list of indexable columns. Same thing for filtering, sorting and grouping. I wanted to implement tag searching, but since I can't index the column, that wasn't going anywhere.

I've contacted kwizcom support and waiting for a reply, but figured I must as well ask here.