Coming soon - Content Type Hubs and Managed Metadata - a post without problems!

I'm making some significant strides in learning about, setting up, and architecting the Managed Metadata Service and Content Type Hubs for my organization. Nothing especially problematic occurring, but it's just such useful stuff that I have to talk about it after it's done. There's an excellent article by Marcel Medina on the administration side of setting this up to work end-to-end.

I've already been trying to get MMS integrated slowly, and now I'm working on a Content Type Hub, but discovering that I've got collision issues trying to create site columns with different data based on context. I started thinking about maybe using multiple Content Type Hubs with multiple MMS services, but wasn't sure how that would affect my term store. Now, I see that I can do exactly what I need with this arrangement (and not an excess of overhead), so I'll be creating a number of departmental MMS service applications and Content Type Hubs for each one. There's a good example scenario in this TechNet article which shows how this might be used.

Adventures in SP2013

I've finally gotten around to setting up a demo VM of SharePoint 2013. Of course, it was necessitated by looking forward to see if we could utilize it to solve a problem a user is having now, so I haven't exactly gotten to dance around in the snowflakes and stare in awe and wonder at the freshness of it all... That said, I'm very much liking what I see so far.

I've had a couple of minor gotchas arise during the testing. For starters, I'm using CriticalPath's SP2013 VM setup guide (free registration required). It's been really good so far, though I got briefly thrown off track due mostly to a dumb mistype on my part and a red herring in the guide. When setting up your new users in Active Directory, the CriticalPath guide includes a PowerShell script and annotations in the document which state that it will handle SQL permissions.

This is not accurate. It's also not a problem, because the SP installer does it for you (provided the account you run the SP installer under has permissions to write to the database to begin with). Just provide the account/credentials for your would-be farm account, and SP will set all the privileges accordingly. That's nice.

When SP offers to create your first site collection, I was thrown off slightly by the fact that the installer defaults to the /sites/ managed path. I had assumed that the root site collection (eg - "/") was going to be created by default, and so after the configuration wizard completed and I couldn't visit http://mynewvm/ but http://mynewvm/sites/test worked, I was a little puzzled.

Part of my testing scenario involved setting up some metadata terms for working with refiners. It was easily done in the site settings for my test site, but then when I was nosing around in the Managed Metadata Service application, I couldn't seem to edit the term store at all. After a short time browsing the Internet unsuccessfully, the reason finally dawned on me - I didn't have permissions to edit the global term store because nobody is defined as a Term Store Administrator! I added myself here, saved the changes, and voila - I can now start creating termsets.

More later.

Missing Metadata Navigation panel

Had a bit of a brief stumper just now.

I've started using the Metadata Navigation panel more in some of my libraries. The tree view is somewhat useful for folder-level filtering, but the real juicy bits come in the Key Filters list.

Well, this is all well and good, but what if you configure Metadata Navigation, and then the panel doesn't even show up? A quick survey of the Interwebs reveals that everyone thinks that there are only two causes to this issue:

1. You turned off the feature
2. Your masterpage is borking it

Two very reasonable conclusions, but in my case, I had two libraries in the same site and one library had the navigation and the other didn't! Egad!

After doing some comparisons (and also noticing some odd webpart behavior from a week ago when I first set these libraries up), I realized that the Metadata Navigation panel appears to only show up for List webparts in something resembling their default configuration (more or less).

For the uninitiated, view pages are simply web part pages that have data view parts with the view information preconfigured based on the ViewFields collection. To a limited extent, you can modify these pages and add extra webparts and such. Apparently, the webpart in one library had its toolbar set to Summary, and another set to Full. I updated the Summary toolbar part to Full, and the nav panel reappeared. I turned it back off, and the panel stayed, so it's not a dependency on the toolbar setting at the very least, but there may have been another missing property in the web part (this library and its singular view had been untouched since our migration to 2010), and it appears that changing the toolbar mode reset that.

I hope this saves someone some agony, but then considering how narrow my particular issues tend to be, I have to laugh at myself about it all...