The Sharepoint 2010 term store has done a terrrific job of raising awareness of the value of taxonomy for organizing enterprise information. Once people are aware of taxonomy, how can they use it? I've discussed the basic applications on this blog already. Taxonomy and the managed metadata feature makes a huge step forward for tagging documents in Sharepoint and for providing sophisticated left hand filtering and navigation through search results.
A more sophisticated tool in Sharepoint 2010 for leveraging managed metadata is the Content Organizer feature. You can read the details at the link just provided. The high level is that the Content Organizer feature can be used to trigger actions or workflows based upon certain managed metadata tags being applied to a document. For example, a document could be routed to a certain folder based upon the tags that are applied. This removes the users burden of placing documents in the correct place - the user only needs to check the document in to Sharepoint and the Content Organizer takes care of the rest.
Content Organizer is a feature worth knowing about. The more you can automate and take tagging and organization out of the hands of the end users (who will resist doing this work anyway), the better your Sharepoint environment is going to be.
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