Office development: Managing meta Data using the Document Information Panel

This article discusses:

Document Information Panel

Maintaining meta data

Using an InfoPath form

This article uses the following techniques:

2007Office system,. NET Framework 3.5

Every organization now faces a critical information management challenge. Because important information is stored in a decentralized location in many different formats, it is difficult to find and use the data easily. In addition to being able to easily find and use data, the company must also develop appropriate strategies for data retention and government compliance.

To meet these emerging requirements and implement information-driven applications, you must give the document the appropriate metadata attributes, and the metadata should be available in all systems on the enterprise. In this article, I'll show you how to enable effective metadata and content management using the Document Information Panel, which is a form-based component provided in Microsoft®word 2007, excel®2007, and powerpoint®2007. It allows the user to manage document-level meta data.

Managing meta data using the Document Information Panel

The Microsoft Office platform always allows you to maintain both standard and custom properties of the document. However, the Document Information Panel allows you to implement more features, such as automated metadata-based search and information-driven business processes. Using the Document Information Panel, users can implement metadata for a specific document in the following four types of document properties: Core or standard properties, custom document properties, content types for Microsoft Office sharepoint®server (MOSS) 2007, and extended and advanced custom attributes. Next let's explore separately.

Core properties users can use the standard document properties view of the Document Information Panel to manage core document properties that are common to all Office documents (author, title, subject, keywords, type, status, and comments, and so on).

Customizing document properties to add more business contexts to an Office document, the 2007 Microsoft Office system allows you to attach a trusted custom infopath® form template as a custom document Information panel. Figure 1 shows the InfoPath form template that I call Checklistmetadata-I'll introduce it later. It is attached to the Word 2007 document as a custom document Information panel.

Figure 1 InfoPath Form Template attached to a Word 2007 Document