WonderLaura @iwmentor – Laura Rogers

Does this sound familiar? Someone at your company organized files by year, then someone else came along and reorganized everything by department. Now nobody knows which folder holds what, and everyone’s just guessing.

This happens all the time with file organization, it’s one of the biggest reasons SharePoint pros like me have been pushing metadata instead of folders. But here’s the thing — getting people to actually fill in that metadata has always been the hard part.

That’s where managed metadata autofill comes in. In this post and video, I’ll show you what it is, how it works, and why it might save you hours the next time you’re migrating files into SharePoint.

🗂️ Folders vs. Metadata (Why This Matters)

Folders feel safe. They’re familiar. But they force everyone to agree on one single way to organize things, and that agreement rarely survives contact with a second employee.

Metadata solves this differently. Instead of forcing files into one rigid folder tree, you add columns — like Department, Audience, or File Category — directly to your document library. Anyone looking for a file can filter by column instead of digging through nested folders.

It also helps with search. Text that lives in a metadata column ranks higher in Microsoft 365 search results than text buried somewhere inside a document. So tagging things well genuinely makes them easier to find later.

The problem? Someone still has to fill in all that metadata. And that’s exactly what autofill is built to fix.

🧠 What Is Managed Metadata, Exactly?

Before autofill makes sense, you need to understand the system underneath it.

Managed metadata is a centrally organized, approved set of tags you can use consistently across every site, library, and list in your tenant. Instead of creating a separate list of departments in eight different choice columns, you define it once in a central place called the term store.

A few quick definitions:

• Term store — the central library where all your approved terms live
• Term sets — groups of related terms, kind of like folders (think “Departments” or “Products”)
• Terms — the actual tags people apply to files
• Enterprise keywords — a looser, free-form tagging option with no strict structure

Why bother with all this structure? Consistent tagging is the foundation for findability, governance, and scale. It also makes retention and compliance requirements far easier to enforce, since everything follows the same approved vocabulary company-wide.

⚡ How Autofill Actually Works

So here’s the fun part. When you’re using autofill with managed metadata, it reads each file’s contents and automatically decide which term or terms it belongs under, based on the term set you’ve connected to that column.

You don’t tag anything yourself. You just upload files to a document library, and AI reads them and fills the columns in for you.

A few important things to know:

1. It’s not a Copilot feature. You don’t need a Copilot license to use it — this runs through a separate pay-as-you-go service in Microsoft 365.
2. It costs pennies, not dollars. Pricing is per document or per term, and it’s genuinely small. You can also cap monthly spend so it never runs away from you.
3. It supports several column types, not just managed metadata — text, multiple lines of text, numbers, yes/no, date and time, choice, hyperlink, and currency columns can all use autofill too.

If you’re migrating a big batch of files into SharePoint for the first time, this is where the real time savings show up. Instead of manually tagging hundreds of documents, you drop them in, walk away, and let AI do the categorizing.

✅ Setting Up Autofill for Managed Metadata

Ready to try it? Here’s how:

1. Check your term store first. Go to Site Settings > Term Store Management (or the Microsoft 365 admin center) and make sure your term sets are organized before you start. A little prep here goes a long way.

2. Add a managed metadata column to your document library, give it a name, and write a short description of what it should look for.

3. Turn on autofill and write a prompt. This description doubles as an AI prompt — something like “What department is this file associated with?” works well.

4. Pick a starting point in your term set. You can’t autofill from the very top level of your entire term store; you have to select a specific term set or subset for AI to search within. In my example, I selected “General Business Taxonomy”.

5. Test it on a real file before saving. You’ll see exactly which term AI picks, so you can sanity-check the prompt before rolling it out. See in the screenshot above, there’s an “acceptable use” policy file that I can test it against.

6. Decide on multiple values, defaults, and required fields. Do you want to allow more than one matching term? Should there be a fallback value if nothing matches?

7. Save the column, then upload your files. Give it a couple of minutes — you’ll watch the metadata populate live as AI works through each document.

Files with a consistent structure — like company policies or contracts — tend to be the best candidates here, since AI has clear, repeatable patterns to look for in each one.

🔍 What I Found Testing This Live

When I tested managed metadata autofill on a batch of company policy documents, results were genuinely impressive. Department and audience fields populated correctly within seconds of upload, based purely on document content.

It’s not flawless, though. On one file, it tagged the department slightly differently than I expected, even though the word “Information Technology” appeared right in the text. That’s a good reminder that this is still AI — it’s assessing the whole document, not just keyword-matching, so it’s worth spot-checking your results, especially early on.

You can also control how often autofill reruns. If you only want new files processed (and not files people go back and edit later), there’s a setting for that in your library settings. It’s a smart way to control costs if you’re watching your pay-as-you-go spend.

Wrap Up

Here’s the thing — managed metadata autofill won’t replace good planning. You still need a clean, well-organized term store for it to work well. But once that foundation is in place, it can save you serious hours, especially during a big migration.

No developer required. No more chasing people down to fill in metadata. Just smarter tagging, right out of the box.

Have you tried managed metadata autofill yet, or are you still team folders? Let me know in the comments — I’d love to hear how you’re using it.

Here’s the associated demo video where I build this step by step:

❓ FAQ