SharePoint 2010 : Social Data: Enhancing Value with User Contributed Content

Tags and Notes

Tagging content is the assignment of descriptive words or categories—terms that mean something to the person doing the tagging. When users add a tag to content in SharePoint, they are essentially adding metadata to describe what it contains, what it does, or what it is about. When they add tags to content, they are extending the formal organizational taxonomy, which improves content “findability.” Tags help expand your solution’s information architecture over time and, most importantly, extend the responsibility for evolving the information architecture to everyone in the organization. This helps associate content with new and emerging terms even before these terms are formally added to the organization’s taxonomy.

Social tagging has a lot of hype—both for SharePoint 2010 and on the Internet in general. Despite the hype, few people actually do it, so even if your organization is reluctant to deploy this feature, adding it doesn’t necessarily mean anyone is going to use it! Why should you consider encouraging the use of this functionality? Because effective collaboration is not just about getting content in; it’s also about getting content out. Adding user-defined tags helps narrow searches or clarify search results so users have a better chance at finding what they need. You don’t have to encourage users to think about the rest of the organization when they tag—I can add tags for myself—so I can find the content later. If it helps everyone else, that’s okay too, but you can encourage users to think about tagging as “it’s all about me” functionality. In this way, you don’t have to spend too much time worrying about whether or not people are tagging everything correctly; a user-defined “folksonomy” doesn’t have to be perfect because it is meant to be personal. In some industries, such as pharmaceutical or legal firms, a carefully planned and monitored taxonomy, vetted by content experts, is absolutely critical. However, don’t let that scare you off—you can easily “tip toe” into the world of social tagging; social tags do not add authoritative metadata, but they do enrich your content with informal insights that can help make sure that relevant content is discovered, even in industries that also have formal taxomomies.

As described earlier, the simplest form of tagging is the “I like it” tag. Tagging a page or document with “I like it” might help you find it later or inform your colleagues of content you find useful, but it’s not nearly as helpful as assigning a more descriptive tag to a document or page by using the Tags & Notes feature. When you select an item and click Tags & Notes, you can quickly see how other users have publicly tagged the content (see Figure 1). (Note that because users can elect to make any tag private, for their own personal use, you can only see “public” tags.)

When you select an item to tag yourself and start to enter a tag, you will see a list of suggested tags based on how you or others have previously used similar terms. As shown in Figure 2, when you tag content, you can see who else has tagged the content, what terms they used, and when they did the tagging.

Figure 2. Entering a tag

Tagging a document is pretty straightforward—hover over the document until the selection check box appears, select the box, and then click Tags & Notes. To tag a SharePoint page or site, simply click the Tags & Notes icon. However, it is also possible to tag external content—for example, an external Internet site. To tag an external site, right-click Tags & Notes and select Add to Favorites. When you are on the external site you want to tag, click Tags and Note Board in your browser Favorites to see the prompt to enter your tag. As shown in Figure 2, each user has the option to make an individual tag private by selecting the Private: Do not show my tags on this item to others check box. If you initially create a public tag and then later make it private, it will be removed from your profile and activity feed, and other users will no longer see the tag. One key “feature” to keep in mind: If you tag a document created by someone else or someone tags a document that you created and you rename the document, the hyperlink in the activity feed or tag profile referencing the document will break. This doesn’t mean that you should never rename a document, but it does mean that there can be implications for users when you do so.

Figure 3 shows how to associate a note with content. Notes are associated with content just like tags, but notes do not affect search results and do not become part of the term store associated with your site. Notes add context to content, and while they are technically part of the metadata associated with your content, they are used to inform users about the content, not to help them find content using browse or search. Adding a note to content will show up in your activity feed, but if you delete a note from a piece of content, it does not delete the activity feed; in other words, even if you delete the note, the addition of the note shows up in your activity feed but not the activity of deleting the note.

Figure 3. Entering a note

A cool, new built-in Tag Cloud Web Part for SharePoint 2010 (see Figure 4) allows you to visually show tags on a site in a compelling way. In the tag cloud, the importance of a tag is shown with font size—more frequently used tags are larger. Each tag term is a hyperlink to the tag profile.

Tag clouds don’t necessarily offer a better or more intuitive way to find content. When they are used appropriately, tag clouds can help provide site users with an instant illustration of the main topics on a site or in the case of your My Site, the main topics that you have cared enough to tag. The main advantage of tag clouds is that they showcase the most important or popular topics dynamically, which is not possible with more traditional static navigational approaches.

Ratings

The ratings feature allows users to rate content and then exposes the ratings as metadata that can be sorted, filtered, and queried. Adding ratings to content theoretically makes it easier for users to find high-quality content. In practice, if you choose to enable this feature, you will need to be sure that users understand what should be rated and what criteria should be used to assign a rating.

Ratings are supported for the following items:

• List items

• Document library items

• Publishing pages

The default values for “ratings” are between 1 and 5. Ratings are stored in the same database as social tags. Ratings share some information with social tags, such as user and item URL. However, ratings data is stored in a separate table in the database.

To use ratings in a specific Site Collection, you first activate the ratings service. Activating the ratings feature adds two Site Collections: Average Rating and Rating Count in a Column group called Ratings Columns. When these Columns are enabled, you can:

• Add the Columns to a Content Type and then add them to all items that have that Content Type.

• Add the Columns manually to enable rating content on a specific list or library.

• Add the Columns automatically to a list or library by using the Enable Rating setting (see Figure 5).

Figure 5. Enable Rating setting

Ratings are off by default in lists and libraries. To enable items to be rated, the list or library owner will need to set the Allow items in this list to be rated? list setting. Enabling ratings adds the ratings fields (average rating and number of ratings) to the Content Types currently on the list and to the default view. You will need to add at least the Rating Column to other list views if you want users to be able to see or rate content in a Web Part or any other view. If you add new Content Types later and they don’t already contain the ratings fields, you will need to add the ratings fields to them either manually or by returning to Rating Settings field and updating the list. Disabling ratings removes the fields from the list (but not from the underlying Content Types) and from the default view.

Users add ratings to an item in a document or list by dragging the cursor across the stars (see Figure 6) until they settle on the desired rating. The same star display shows the average rating and is also used to submit a rating. The average rating shows up in blue on the star display. As the user pauses over a star, the star changes to yellow to reflect the rating the user submits when the mouse is clicked. If the user moves the mouse off the stars, the control displays the average rating again. Some users may find this behavior to be a little confusing at first, so be prepared to explain what happens when they submit their ratings. Once a rating is submitted, the display reverts back to the average rating, so a user may wonder if his rating “stuck.” To see how you personally rated an item, you move the cursor back over the star display and a window pops up to show your personal rating.

When the User Profile Service Application—Social Rating Synchronization Job Timer Job—runs (part of Central Administration), it will synchronize ratings across the implementation. This means that ratings may not be visible to others immediately. As additional ratings are added to content, the average rating shown will change, dynamically reflecting how users have rated the content.

While rating content is simple and works pretty much the same way it does on familiar sites such as Amazon.com, you will need to ensure that users understand your objectives with content ratings. As mentioned earlier, you need to clearly define the context for ratings—do you want users to rate how much they like the content (which might be appropriate when you are asking users to help choose among several alternatives), or do you want users to rate the value of the content for a specific purpose? Be sure that your document library description clearly tells users what ratings mean in the context of your library if you choose to enable this feature.