SharePoint 2010 - Social Tagging and Rating

What is a Tag
A tag is a word or phrase that identifies an individual piece of information according to a set of attributes or criteria. Tags make it easy to find and share information about a specific subject or task.

Social Tagging
Social tagging helps users categorize information in ways that are meaningful to them. Social tagging can improve the quality of search results by filtering against specific tags, and it can also connect individuals who want to share information with other users who have like interests.

What can be tagged?
■List Items
■Documents
■Pages (because there are documents ;)
■External pages
This means everything that has an URL can be tagged.

Tagging a List Item/ Document
By default, in a Publishing Portal, Manage Metadata feature is enabled at site collection level which introduces an association of a Site Column named "Enterprise Keywords" with each list/library item/document. In case this is not experienced on any item, the need is to enable the feauture "Enterprise Metadata and Keywords Settings" under the "Permissions and Management" group at Document Library settings page. Once this feature is activated on the document library, a new column gets added to the library columns. By default, the data referred by this column comes from the Metadata store which can be configured in Central Administration site.


Fig 2: Enable the Enterprise Keywords in a document library

Also, a user defined column can be created in any list or library. A column data type is provided in SharePoint 2010 as "Managed Metadata", which provides the freedom to the user to opt from a list of Metadata stores to tag with the column.

Fig 3: Adding a Managed Metadata column to a list

Now, all is set for tagging a list item. I have numbered down the steps to tag a list item (same is for document library item):
1. Go to the list/ library.
2. Edit any item.
3. You will have a column named "Enterprise Keywords" or as suggested by you while creating the new column.
4. Type some word in the textbox given there. You will see some suggestions are being given to you by the Metadata service, which again comes from either the default Metadata Store or the once you configured for the column while creating it.

Fig 4: Tagging a list item to a keyword

5. Based on the attributes set for the Metadata Store, the words will be resolved, if found in the store or will get added to the store, if not found.
6. Click Ok. Your item is now tagged with the value you selected and now this item/ document will be searchable based on the tag associated with it.

Tagging a Page

Fig 5: Tagging a page

Another alternate to the above option can be found at the top right corner of the page, "Tags & Notes", as shown below:

Fig 6: Tagging a Page


To tag a SharePoint page you can use the any of the above mentioned ways either from user’s context menu or from the "Tags & Notes" option available on each page of the site, as shown above. Clicking “Tag or Note this Page” opens the following dialog:

Fig 7: Add Tags to a Page

You can tag the page just like the list item before, but in addition you will get a list of suggested tags and you can mark them as private, so other user will not see them. At the bottom of the dialog you see a tag and note history. Furthermore you can add notes to the page (see in the second tab on the top).

How to tag an external page?
Since years I miss a tool from Microsoft to centrally manage bookmarks and I believe I’m not alone. To tag external pages you have first to add a link to the SharePoint tagging dialog to your browser’s favorites:


Fig 8: Tagging an External Page

This adds the “Tags and Noteboard” bookmark (JavaScript) to your browsers favorites list. Now you tag an external page like this:

Fig 9: Tags and Noteboard in favourites

Clicking to the “Tag and Noteboard” brings up the same dialog as in the previous example for a SharePoint page. You can tag and write notes as usual.

Tag Cloud Web Part
For sure you want to use your tags to navigate and filter content. For this reason there is now a tag cloud web part included in SharePoint 2010.




Fig 10: Tag Cloud web parts

My Tags and Notes
You can manage your tags globally as shown below.



Fig 11: My Tags and Notes

Ratings
One of the main features of SharePoint is the document libraries and if used correctly they can get very full, very quickly. How can we make it easier for users to find the best articles within a large document library.

One of the ways is to use ratings, this feature in SharePoint 2010 lets users rate documents and then you can sort the document library on the ratings field.

Enabling Ratings
Go to the document library, see the ribbon and click on Library Settings

Fig 12: Document Library Ribbon with Library Settings option

Click on the Rating settings option


Fig 13: Enable ratings in a Document Library

Click the Yes option and then click OK


Fig 14: Select Yes and then OK

NOTE
For this to work you must have a User Profile application service connection associated with the web application.

Rating Documents
Now when we return to the document library, the rating field is enabled


Fig 15: Document Library with Rating column

To rate an item simply drag your mouse over the number of stars you want to give it and then click the left button


Fig 16: Rate a document

NOTE
If you have rated a document and then wondered why it disappears, well that’s easy. Part of the user synchronisation connection service is a timer job that runs every hour to update any ratings that have been added. You can run this manually from the central admin if you so wish.

So, that is all for this while. Will be back again with some other interesting features like Metadata Management aka Term Store Management tool provided by Microsoft in SharePoint 2010....