SharePoint Document management lovers – your panel awaits

Completing the metadata classification in SharePoint can be a cumbersome process, especially if there are many fields to complete.  Users will often not classify content correctly and simply leave fields blank because this involves switching back to SharePoint.

Introducing Live Metadata for Word and Excel.  Live Metadata is an Office add-in that supports editing SharePoint metadata when editing Word documents and Excel spreadsheets.

Free trial

Live Metadata will more easily maintain your metadata and supports:

• Microsoft Word support (all platforms).
• Microsoft Excel support (all platforms) – this is not supported by Microsoft’s Word SharePoint Properties Panel.
• All SharePoint field types.
• Customise display and edit views – Being able to configure which fields are displayed and editable in our panel was a key customer feature request.   You may configure two (2) library views to target the displayed and editable metadata, it works as follows:
  • Display View – if the library has a view called “Qualitem Display Fields”, Live Metadata will use this view to determine which fields are displayed in the app and in which order they are shown.   Please note, any mandatory fields will always be shown in the panel – even if they are not in either the display or edit view.
  • Edit View – if the library has a view called “Qualitem Edit Fields”, Live Metadata will use this view to determine which fields are editable.

Please note, the views MUST be called the names nominated above as it works based on their naming convention.  Also, the edit view supersedes the display view, and if both views exist, a merge of both views occurs.   This allows the document administrator to set the display and edit fields per library.

• Dark mode – is a setting that allows you to switch the add-in to a dark theme.   The latest version of Office supports dark mode themes; these are known to reduce eye strain in low-light conditions.  Live Metadata can be set per-user (via the settings menu) to take on the automatic dark-mode setting of Office to remember the user’s theme preferences.
• Open file location – Via the menu, you may at any time, use this option to open the document library location of the current document.

More detail on these features can be found in the following article https://www.qualitem.com/2020/05/14/live-metadata-a-substitute-for-word-sharepoint-property-panel.

Roadmap features

The Live Metadata has significant value added features for organizations looking for more than just the updating of metadata in each document or spreadsheet.

The following are additional features available in the upcoming version of Live Metadata due out soon:

• Broken metadata reporting

This feature warns the user when the metadata in the document is broken; this is something the user may not be aware of because:

1. There are typically no visible indications that the document is broken.  The metadata information is stored within the document and not loaded from SharePoint and therefore appears to be correct when inspected.
2. The SharePoint parser will be unable to fix broken documents if the web GUID references are from another SharePoint site.
3. None of the migration tools on the market will fix the contents of document during migration. Migration tools do not break the documents, they just don’t fix them as this would involve editing the contents of the document.

Please note that Live Metadata will notify you if there are additional broken field within the document that are not displayed using the Qualitem Display/Edit Fields view or default view.

Live Metadata will scan the metadata fields and display errors against each field within the panel view.   This is a report only feature.   Simply replacing or rectifying the metadata values may not fully fix the problem.  If you’re lucky, field types like people picker may be resolvable by replacing the broken values, however this should not be assumed for all field types.

Please note, if you suspect your documents have many broken fields, please contact us at sales @ Qualitem dot com for a comprehensive analysis across all your libraries.

Broken quickparts – more information on what broken quickparts can be found at https://www.qualitem.com/2019/10/22/broken-quick-parts-metadata-after-sharepoint-migration.  For organizations that use quickparts, it is extremely frustrating when metadata from SharePoint is not correctly promoted through to the document.

Conclusion

For more information on how to install the add-in, please go to our website at https://www.qualitem.com/live-metadata/get-it-now/.