Best Practices for SharePoint Term Store and Power Automate Integration

Introduction:

Managing metadata effectively is crucial for scalable and maintainable SharePoint environments. SharePoint’s Term Store provides a centralized way to manage taxonomy, while Power Automate enables automation across your organisation. When combined, these tools can significantly enhance content tagging, data consistency, and process automation. In this post, we’ll walk through best practices for integrating the SharePoint Term Store with Power Automate.

1. Understand the Term Store Structure

Before integrating, ensure you understand how the Term Store is organised:

• Term Groups: Top-level containers for organising Term Sets.
• Term Sets: Collections of related terms.
• Terms: Individual metadata entries used for tagging.

Ensure proper governance and naming conventions are in place to prevent confusion or duplication.

2. Use PnP PowerShell or PnPjs for Bulk Term Management

Managing terms programmatically (via PnP PowerShell or PnPjs in SharePoint Framework) is more efficient than manual entry, especially in large taxonomies.

• Automate term provisioning.
• Keep staging and production environments in sync.

Example: Use Power Automate to trigger a PowerShell script that syncs term sets from a central source.

3. Accessing the Term Store in Power Automate

Out-of-the-box Power Automate connectors do not provide native actions to query the Term Store. Workarounds include:

• HTTP Requests to SharePoint REST API
• Azure Functions or Custom Connectors

Example REST API call:

GET _api/v2.1/termStore/sets('{termSetId}')/terms

Ensure the flow has the correct permissions (App-Only or Delegated permissions via Azure AD).

4. Create Reusable Flows for Term Retrieval

Develop modular flows to fetch terms from a term set and reuse them across different workflows:

• Input: Term Set ID
• Output: List of terms (as an array or JSON)

This promotes reusability and reduces redundancy.

5. Use Term GUIDs, Not Labels

Avoid using plain text labels when referencing terms in automated flows.

• Use the term GUIDs to ensure uniqueness
• Prevent issues with label duplication or localisation

6. Dynamic Tagging in SharePoint List Items

Use retrieved term GUIDs to tag list items dynamically:

"TaxCatchAll": [
  {
    "Label": "India",
    "TermID": "b8b3a6ab-0c4d-4c4a-8a9e-d0e74f9623fe"
  }
]

Use the Send an HTTP request to SharePoint action to update list items programmatically.

7. Error Handling and Logging

Include error handling for API calls:

• Retry policies
• Logging to a SharePoint list or Dataverse table
• Email alerts for failures

8. Security and Permissions

• Ensure flows run under an account with Term Store access
• Use Azure-managed identities or certificate-based app registration for sensitive operations

9. Limit API Calls and Throttle Efficiently

SharePoint API has throttling limits:

• Use pagination when querying large term sets
• Implement delays using Delay action in Power Automate

10. Maintain Documentation

Document:

• Term Set structures
• API endpoints
• Power Automate flow logic

This helps in onboarding, debugging, and long-term maintenance.

Conclusion:

When integrated correctly, the SharePoint Term Store and Power Automate provide a powerful solution for automating metadata-driven processes. By following these best practices, you ensure scalability, reliability, and maintainability across your organisation. Start small, build reusable components, and always document your integrations.

If you have any questions you can reach out our SharePoint Consulting team here.