Category Planning and Management

Categories are optional—they provide users of a SharePoint Portal Server workspace with an additional way to search for documents. Because you apply categories to individual documents, they do not rely on, or affect, the location of the document in the document library hierarchy. Therefore, a single document can be associated with several categories.

To determine which categories you will need to create, ask users and content owners how their documents are currently organized. Determine the strong and weak points of the current structure, and then develop categories that build on this structure. You can use the existing folder hierarchy as a model for developing a new category hierarchy if it meets the needs of your users.

Determining the number of categories to create depends on the type of organization with which you are working. For example, if you are setting up a workspace for a large manufacturing firm that produces a wide range of diverse products, hundreds of categories may be required to support effective user browsing. However, if you are setting up a workspace for a small consulting firm that specializes in a niche field, fewer than twenty categories may be required.

Designing Your Category Structure

Consider how users choose to organize the content when planning the category structure. For example, do they organize content by department, by project, or by subject matter? If the users organize content by subject matter, what are the top-level categories? How many levels of subcategories do you want users to navigate? You can use SharePoint Portal Server to define as many category levels as you want. However, the more levels you establish, the more likely it is that a user will have difficulty finding content. If you have not organized content in this way before, begin with a shallow structure of one to three levels. You can easily modify the category hierarchy after users have tested the initial category structure.

It is recommended that you use no more than 500 categories in a single workspace.

SharePoint Portal Server supports document management by using categories, document profiles, and document folders to organize documents in the workspace. Each of these components has specific issues related to planning. For more information about how to establish a taxonomy and design a category structure, see Chapter 9, Planning Taxonomies.

Creating Categories

After you determine which categories to add, use Windows Explorer to create your structure in the Categories folder of the workspace. In a SharePoint Portal Server workspace, only a coordinator can create new categories. Each top-level category has its own top-level category folder. A subcategory is a subfolder under the corresponding category folder. When you create a category, SharePoint Portal Server automatically generates the associated category query. At the time you create the category, the SharePoint Portal Server also updates the schema. This enables users to assign the new category value to their documents.

A category must be uniquely identifiable in a workspace. In SharePoint Portal Server, a path identifies each category. The path corresponds to the URL of the category in the workspace. For example, the URL of a category named Boots under a top-level category named Shoes is:

http://server_name/SharePointPortalServer/workspace_name/Categories/Shoes/Boots

This category is identified by the category path ":Shoes:Boots" on document profiles and in the category query.

Managing Categories

Although categories look like file system folders, they are not the same. You can delete and rename categories, but you cannot move them around in the category hierarchy. When you delete a category, SharePoint Portal Server removes the category and all subcategories but it does not delete the documents associated with the category. It removes the category value from the Categories property on all documents in the category. If the name of the category is changed, the new category will contain the same documents. The rename operation initiates a process that updates all the documents with the new category name.

Category maintenance is a resource-intensive process. It is recommended that you perform these tasks during maintenance periods.

Categories automatically inherit their security settings from the Categories folder, and thus category security can only be managed at the workspace level. Permission to manage categories is restricted to the coordinators role on the category folders. All other roles have only read access to the categories.