From the course: Using Microsoft Syntex for AI Information Management in SharePoint

Making existing information useful - SharePoint Tutorial

From the course: Using Microsoft Syntex for AI Information Management in SharePoint

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Making existing information useful

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- [Instructor] When I'm talking about discovering hidden information in existing documents, what exactly do I mean? I think the easiest way to explain is by looking at an example. So here's a document library containing a bunch of sample invoices. Right out of the gate, there's not a lot of information about what the invoices contain. If we open up one of the invoices, we can see that there's a lot more potentially useful information. There's customer info, date of sale, dollar amounts. This is all valuable metadata that's not currently available to us. If you're not familiar with the term metadata, let me explain. In a nutshell, it's data about data. In this case, it describes the document and gives additional information about it, and its contents, customer name, date of sale, dollar amounts. Those are all aspects of this document that make it distinct from other similar documents. If we had that information to hand, we could use it to sort, filter and organize our documents. We could analyze it or utilize it in our workflows. How do we get that information into a place where we can use it? Yes, we could set up our library so that we had to enter this information whenever we uploaded documents to it, but that's going to require extra work on the part of the workers doing the uploading. If we're talking about a lot of invoices, that's potentially a major impact on their workday. And what are we going to do about the stuff that's already in libraries? Are we going to have to manually go back through it all, opening every document individually to find the information we want, and then editing the library line by line? And this is where Syntex comes in. Syntax provides a number of different features, which will help us automate the extraction of this data. It can take a whole library, go through the documents one by one, capturing information, and then use that information to create new metadata columns in the library. Those columns can then be used to create new views in the library to suit the needs of different user groups. They can also be used to trigger workflows that perform a whole range of different tasks. Everything from assigning documents to workers for review, to archiving or deleting obsolete documents to even as far as creating new documents based on predetermined factors. If you need more information about metadata in SharePoint and how it can be used, I want to refer you to another of my courses, SharePoint for Enterprise Data Management. In this course, I spend quite a bit of time on metadata and how it can be used to boost the usability of your SharePoint documents and data.

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