In the SharePoint Term Store, what is difference between the term groups above the line and below the line?"

SharePoint Managed Metadata Question of the Week

Each week we will be featuring an audience question from WAND's recent webinar, "Managed Metadata 101: Taxonomies and Tagging in SharePoint," and sharing the answer with our blog audience.

This week's question is, "In the SharePoint Term Store, what is difference between the term groups above the line and below the line ?"

Answer: In the SharePoint term store, term groups above the line are your groups of managed terms. These are your taxonomies in SharePoint and you can create your own groups above the line.  The term groups below the line are system term groups which covers three things:

1)   Enterprise Keywords, which are terms that your users have “free-form” tagged in SharePoint

using the Enterprise Keywords column or the ‘Tags and  Notes’ feature.   Enterprise keywords can be reviewed and promoted to become managed terms if you like and these are good to review regularly to see what terminology your users are using.

2)   Orphaned Terms.  This term set contains terms that were being shared in other term sets, and the owning Term was deleted.  You should assign ownership of the term to one of its shared terms.

3)   Custom Term Sets. These are terms sets that are custom created at the site collection level. 

This answer is applicable to SharePoint 2010, SharePoint 2013, and SharePoint Online.


If you are just starting with the SharePoint Term Store and need a taxonomy to get started with, download a free SharePoint Taxonomy from WAND.