You’re headed for a world of pain if you’re not spending a lot of time thinking about, or discussing, metadata in your involvement with a SharePoint project at work.

The use of SharePoint metadata is what unlocks the real value of our PDF for SharePoint solution. It enables a wide range of business process automation that can replace inefficient manual procedures that rely on individual users to do it correctly.

If you are working in a regulated industry such as pharmaceutical or life sciences, compliance is especially critical to the success of your business. Automating processes is required to achieve compliance and minimize the costs of ensuring that you do so.

Ignore the capability to tag your content so that it be efficiently found – and you might as well go back to the shared folders you just moved all of those documents from. SharePoint 2010 includes many metadata enhancements for managing your content, making it a more powerful document management or ECM solution.

We already discussed the new Document Sets content type in a previous post about SharePoint 2010. This is an important new development for organizing content that we will definitely be supporting in an upcoming release.

Other metadata-related enhancements in SharePoint 2010 make it more efficient to manage your content:

• Enterprise Managed Metadata services
• Content ratings, to leverage the wisdom of crowds
• User level tagging of content, aka “folksonomies”
• Document IDs, a unique document identifier that can be used to link to a file even if it is moved to a different location.

These new features of SharePoint 2010 facilitate the use of metadata in SharePoint deployments, enabling more automation of document processes.