New: SharePoint Advanced — Metadata, Columns, Lists, Taxonomy

New course just dropped: SharePoint Advanced — Metadata, Columns, Lists, Taxonomy. Self-paced, pre-recorded, open enrollment.

Confession: I've walked into orgs where a five-year-old SharePoint site has 14,000 documents, no metadata, three competing folder structures, and a search box that mostly returns the same six PDFs no matter what you type. This is not SharePoint's fault. It's the natural shape of any document store where nobody invested 90 minutes up front to design a taxonomy. This course is those 90 minutes, paid forward.

What's in the box

• Taxonomy 101 — what a content categorization scheme actually is, in plain English
• Site columns vs list columns — the small difference that determines whether your sites stay consistent over time
• Managed metadata — the term store, taxonomies that span sites, governance patterns
• Content types — the most under-used SharePoint feature and the one that holds everything together
• Search configuration — refiners, managed properties, the SP setup that turns search from "useless" to "actually useful"
• Migration patterns — for the brave soul inheriting a 14,000-document mess

Who this is for

• SharePoint admins who've configured a site farm but never built a taxonomy from scratch
• IT consultants who keep getting hired to "fix SharePoint" without a clear playbook
• PMs/operations leads wanting their team's SharePoint to outlast them by years, not weeks
• Microsoft 365 architects working SharePoint Online and the modern experience

What you'll be able to do after

• Design a taxonomy for a new SharePoint site in 90 minutes and trust it for the next 5 years
• Build a content type once and reuse it across 30 sites
• Configure search refiners so users actually find what they need on the first try
• Run a "spring cleaning" on an inherited SharePoint mess without breaking anything live

→ Take the course

Self-paced, pre-recorded, open enrollment.

Thank you to every SharePoint admin who let me run a taxonomy workshop in their conference room. The "but the legal team won't use the right content type" objection became the entire fourth module. Thank you. (Spoiler: legal eventually used the right content type.)

Common SharePoint mistakes the course explicitly fixes

Building taxonomy bottom-up instead of top-down. Teams start by listing their existing folders and turning each one into a managed term. Result: an enormous flat term store nobody can navigate. The course teaches the top-down method — start with the half-dozen biggest organizational concepts (department, document type, lifecycle stage, audience) and build down.

Treating SharePoint like OneDrive with permissions. Document libraries with no metadata become drag-and-drop dumping grounds. The fix isn't more training; it's making the metadata mandatory at upload time via content types. Three required fields beats a six-page upload guide that nobody reads.

One taxonomy per site. Each new SharePoint site gets its own term store and its own field definitions. Six months later there are 12 sites with 12 ways to mean "client name." The course shows how to define managed metadata once at the tenant level and reuse everywhere.

Skipping the search refiner config. SharePoint's search is actually good — but only if you've told it which managed properties to refine on. Default config = useless search. The course walks the configuration in module five.

Not auditing for orphan content types. Five years in, you'll have content types no document uses anymore plus content types used by 50 docs that nobody knows are duplicates. Quarterly audit. The course gives you the script.

The 90-minute taxonomy workshop the course teaches you to run

The first module ships a workshop facilitator's guide — a 90-minute session you can run with any team to draft a working taxonomy before lunch. The shape: 15 minutes of "what do we file" inventory, 30 minutes of "group these into 5-7 buckets" affinity-mapping, 20 minutes of "name the buckets with terms a new hire would understand," 15 minutes of validation against your three biggest use cases, 10 minutes of wrap-up and ownership assignment.

The workshop's secret weapon is the "new-hire test" — could a person who joined the company yesterday find a document using only the taxonomy terms, no tribal knowledge? If no, the terms aren't ready. That single test eliminates 90% of jargon-based taxonomies.

Self-paced, pre-recorded, open enrollment.