Managing Atlas Term Sets for Metadata and Navigation

Please note: Users need specific Term Store permissions to be able to contribute and manage it. Term Store Administrators can assign more administrators, or provide "Contributor" access to specific term groups.

If you are a SharePoint Administrator, you can access the Term Store from the SharePoint Admin Centre, under Content services > Term store.

If you are a Site Owner with Term Store permissions, click the "cogwheel" icon in the top right of the screen, click Site information, then click View all site settings towards the bottom of the panel. In the Site Settings page, under Site Administration choose Term store management:

In this article:

• Adding Terms to Atlas Term Sets
  • Metadata Terms
  • Navigation Terms
• Merging Terms
• Deprecating Terms
• Copying Terms
• Reusing Terms
• Pinning Terms
  
  

Adding Terms to Atlas Term Sets

Metadata Terms

Atlas metadata term sets such as Department, Location and Subject are stored inside the "Atlas" term group.

1. Expand the “Atlas” term set group to see the available term sets:
   
2. Expand the term set you want to modify - at the top level you should see the "all" term marked with a * e.g. *Departments*. If you expand the *All* term, you will see the available values for that metadata. Warning: All additional terms must be added BELOW the *All* term.
   
   
3. Click the 3 dots on the right of the row of the term you wish to add sub terms to. This could be directly under the *All* term, or lower. When you click the 3 dots, you'll get the following options:
   
4. Clicking Add Term on an existing term will create the new term at the level below:
   
5. Type the name for the term into the box then press the Enter key to add it. If you click out of the box before pressing Enter your term will not be added!
   
6. You can add many levels of terms to represent the information hierarchy:
   

Navigation Terms

Atlas Navigation terms are stored under the Global Navigation term in the Atlas Navigation term group. They can be managed in the same way as metadata terms, explained in the previous section.

If you are configuring the Global Navigation term set you can add many levels of hierarchy for use in the breadcrumb, but the menu will only be able to show the top five levels (top level plus four sub-levels) for the Hover Menu, or the top three levels (top level plsu two sub-levels) for the Mega Menu.

Merging Terms

Merging two terms makes them seem as though they are alternative labels for one term. If items are already using these terms in SharePoint, they will now refer to the same term rather than two different ones. If you had two departments with a similar business function that were merged, you could merge the terms referring to them, instantly giving you a single term by which to refer to the new merged department.

To do this just choose the Merge Terms option from one of the terms in question, then use the dialog to browse to the other one. You could repeat this process to merge many terms together.

Deprecating Terms

Deprecating a term essentially means preventing it from being used for new items, but without deleting it from the system which would destroy its tagging history on existing items. When deprecated the current tagging is preserved and the term can still be searched for, but new items cannot be given that tag. Child terms of the selected term will not be deprecated.

This might be relevant in many areas, for example if items are tagged to the project they are related to; when the project ends you would want to prevent new items being accidentally tagged with the specific project tag, but you still want to be able to see the items that were relevant.

Copying Terms

Copying a term creates a completely unlinked copy of the selected term at the chosen target location. All configuration will be copied except the GUID, so when one of the copies is edited the other will remain the same. This may be useful if complex configuration needs to be repeated for multiple terms – the configuration can be applied to one term, then that term copied to create more copies of the configuration.

Reusing Terms

Reusing a term creates a linked term in the target location. The important thing about term reuse is that any instance of a reused item can be edited to update all instances of that item. This allows term reuse across sets without creating multiple versions of the same data that would need to be maintained.

Pinning Terms

Pinning terms creates a linked term in the target location, which updates when the parent item is updated. There are two differences between pinning and reuse:

• Pinning includes the child tree of terms under the selected term, while Reuse only applies to the single term
• Reuse allows any instance to be updated and applies those updates to all instances, while Pinning means the source terms are updated to apply changes to the destination.