Discussing the ins and outs of developing for SharePoint and the Microsoft platform

I think this might actually be my first post related to stuff I have been doing with SharePoint 2010, so hooray for me on that one! Basically I have been tinkering around with some of the new features of the product, and one of the interesting ones that I wanted to understand a bit more was the managed keyword service. I wont run off into explaining the whole service now (TechNet does a good job of that if you are interested – see http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee424402%28office.14%29.aspx) but I will explain one issue that I came across.

Basically when you first enter the tool (through central administration > Application Management > Manage Service Applications > Managed Metadata Service) you will see a hierarchy like this:

Now this is the part that confused me – I had no idea how to add new groups or terms to this list. I looked around the screen and couldn’t see any obvious way to add a term. Eventually I found that what I needed to do to get it to work was to add myself as a term administrator (just being the farm admin apparently isn’t enough). With the “Managed Metadata Service” item in the above tree selected, you will see a screen that has a number of settings for the service as a whole on it, including a people picker for term administrators.

I simply added myself as a user there and wouldn’t you know it, when I move my mouse over items in the term store hierarchy I see the little arrow and get a menu to add items with when I click on them.

Just to test this, when I removed myself from the admin property we just set I loose the ability to add and modify the terms as well, so that definitely looks like the cause to me. It just seems odd that a farm admin would need the extra permissions, but in the end its not a big deal for the time being.