In SharePoint, metadata is good. Metadata is very good. "That's great," you say, "but what the heck is metadata?" Metadata is data about your data. Got it? Good, I'm glad you're going along with me on that. Ok, ok. Metadata is information you attach to your SharePoint content that provides contextual clues to the subject, audience, and/or intent of your content. For an example of metadata, you need to look no further than this blog post. At the end of it, you'll see that I've applied some "tags" to this post that summarize some of the topics I touch on in this blog post. Because while the title of this blog summarizes the main topic of the post, it doesn't tell the reader that I'm talking about documents, search, collaboration sites and lists. The tags I've put on this post do tell you that I mention those topics in this post and give you a better idea of what it covers. So how does this apply to SharePoint? As I said above, metadata is a very good thing in SharePoint. The most obvious benefit is the added context it gives to the consumers of your content when they are looking at it. But it also drastically improves the discoverability of your content; metadata provides SharePoint with more hooks into the context of your content so that it can easily categorize, crawl, and index. Categorization is important because SharePoint doesn't really do folders very well. We're all very accustomed to using folders; it's...