Brainlitter » Nifty 2 Minute Tip of the Day – Use Harmon.IE to update managed metadata across multiple documents at once in SharePoint

Nifty 2 Minute Tip of the Day – Use Harmon.IE to update managed metadata across multiple documents at once in SharePoint

Ok, this one will be short. I’m tired and I’m about ready to throw my laptop out of the window as the Internet access at this hotel is BRUTAL tonight. So apologies if this is a little disjointed, but the gist is here.

The Challenge

If you have a whole bunch of documents in a SharePoint library (note, this won’t help with a list I’m afraid, at least at this writing) and you want to update their managed metadata (in my case, it was a bunch of documents moved from one site collection to another, in a different farm), you’ll quickly learn that managed metadata columns are not available in the Datasheet view.

SNAGHTML2e205b1c

Figure 1 : While Managed Metadata is really handy for identifying content…

SNAGHTML2e208171

Figure 2 : But if I want to bulk update a whole bunch of documents, I can’t use the datasheet capabilities

The Solution

One of my favourite SharePoint add-ins in recent memory is Harmon.IE for a number of reasons, including price (free, unless you need the enterprise features). And tonight, I have another reason to like it. Updating managed metadata for a number of documents, at once.

  • First off, get Harmon.IE – go to http://harmon.ie
  • I’m not going to go into details about installing it or the key reasons to use Harmon.IE, as they do a good job on their website so I’m going to assume you have it installed and connected to Outlook (yep Outlook, Harmon.IE is an IE integrated tool, but that connects you to your SharePoint libraries and that is the secret here…

SNAGHTML2e210ea2

Figure 3: so the trick is, get the documents listed that are related and need bulk metadata processing and…

SNAGHTML2e216d16

Figure 4 : Set that metadata

One response to “Nifty 2 Minute Tip of the Day – Use Harmon.IE to update managed metadata across multiple documents at once in SharePoint”

  1. Excellent find! I was just thinking about writing a PowerShell script to do it – I needed to update few hundred documents. Additionally it allows you to drag and drop emails from Outlook directly to SharePoint. Thanks

Comments are closed.