What is the SharePoint Term Store?
The Term Store is the central brain of your tenant’s metadata. Get it right and your whole organisation works from a shared vocabulary. Get it wrong and you have multiple competing taxonomies.
What it is
The Term Store is a centrally-managed location in the SharePoint Admin Center where official organisational vocabularies live. It’s where your departments, locations, document types, and other shared terms are defined — once — and then made available to every library that wants to use them via Managed Metadata columns.
Inside the Term Store you have Term Groups (top-level containers, often by domain — ‘Corporate’, ‘Operations’, ‘Compliance’), Term Sets (lists of terms within a group — ‘Departments’, ‘Locations’), and Terms (the actual values — ‘Human Resources’, ‘Marketing’, ‘Finance’). Terms can have children, synonyms, descriptions, and translations.
The Term Store is admin-territory, not user territory. Most users never see it — they just see the dropdown lists in their Managed Metadata columns. But the design choices made in the Term Store shape every classification across the tenant. A well-designed Term Store makes the rest of SharePoint sing. A poorly-designed one creates years of friction.
When to use this
- When your organisation needs shared vocabularies across many sites.
- When you’re consolidating multiple competing department/location/type lists.
- When you’re preparing the foundation for Copilot rollout.
- Almost always for any organisation above ~100 users — the cost of not having it grows with scale.
How to do it
- Open the SharePoint Admin Center.
- Navigate to More features → Term store.
- Create or select a term group (organising container, e.g. ‘Corporate Vocabularies’).
- Add term sets within the group (e.g. ‘Departments’, ‘Locations’).
- Add terms within each set (the actual values).
- Set governance: who owns each term set? Who can add new terms?
- Make terms ‘available for tagging’ so libraries can use them.
Best practices
- Assign Term Store Administrators. Limit who can edit global terms. Most users should not.
- Use hierarchies thoughtfully. ‘Australia’ under ‘APAC’ under ‘Region’ creates useful structure — but don’t overdo nesting.
- Document the governance for each term set. Who owns it? How often is it reviewed? What’s the change process?
- Don’t put everything in the Term Store. Library-local lists should stay as Choice columns. Only true cross-tenant vocabularies belong here.
Common mistakes
- No governance — anyone can add terms. The taxonomy quickly drifts and quality crashes.
- Trying to model everything in the Term Store from day one. Start small. Add as you understand needs.
- Treating the Term Store as a database. It’s a vocabulary system, not a relational database. Don’t try to make it both.
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What is the SharePoint Term Store used for?
The Term Store is a tenant-level repository of vocabulary used in Managed Metadata columns. Administrators create term sets (Departments, Locations, Document Types), populate them with terms (HR, Marketing, Finance), and libraries across the tenant reference those term sets. It’s how SharePoint enforces consistent classification at scale.
Where do I find the Term Store in SharePoint?
In the SharePoint admin center, open the More features section and click Term store. You can also reach it through Microsoft Purview at Content services → Term store. You need to be a SharePoint admin, a global admin, or a designated Term Store administrator to access it.
What’s the difference between a term set and a term in SharePoint?
A term set is a collection of related terms (e.g. ‘Departments’). A term is an individual value within a set (e.g. ‘HR’ inside the Departments term set). Term sets sit inside groups, which are organisational containers — typically one per business function or top-level taxonomy.
Is the Term Store worth setting up for a small team?
Usually not. The Term Store is governance overhead — it needs an owner, a review process, and discipline about what goes in. For one or two sites, Choice columns do the job with no setup. The break-even point is usually around 5+ active sites with shared content, where the consistency benefits start to outweigh the maintenance cost.