As part a series of blogs, stemming from my original post Boost End Users Productivity with SharePoint IA & OOB Functions, I will explain in detail how to configure some out-of-the-box (OOB) SharePoint functions. In this installment I will cover how to enable and utilize Content Rating in SharePoint. By enabling content rating you can help end users find what others view as higher quality content quicker thus boosting their productivity. I have a few favorite SharePoint functions and this is one of them. This feature is similar to the amazon.com feature but you are unable to comment along with your rating. You can enable content rating on the following SharePoint Items:
• Lists or Libraries
• Content Types
• Page Layouts of a Publishing Page
• Blog Posts
What is great about this SharePoint Function is users can now rate content, giving them another way of finding and viewing information. Rating content will allow users to create views or sort based on documents rating. You can configure SharePoint search to display ratings as well, but that will be covered in an upcoming blog so stay tuned.
Back to enabling content rating, I am going to use a document library in my example but similar steps can be taken for the items above to enable ratings.
1. From within your Document Library select Library under the Library Tools Tab in the ribbon, then select Library Settings in the settings group.
2. Under General Settings select the Ratings Settings Link
3. In the Ratings Settings section (the only section) select the Yes radio button for the question Allow items in this list to be rated? And select ok to save your changes.
4. Once you have enabled ratings you will see that Rating (0-5) and Number of Ratings have been added to your document library columns.
5. NOTE* If you receive the following error, contact your SharePoint Farm administrator to ensure that the User Profile Service is running
NOTE* Don’t be alarmed if your ratings don’t show up right away. After you enable ratings and rate some documents it takes SharePoint some time to apply them to the view. If you hover over the stars you will see that you have rated this document even though the ratings have not appeared yet. In my example below I have rated the Lunch menu 5 stars even though they do not appear.
Now that you have enabled content rating in your document library users are able to create new views utilizing ratings or sort documents based on rating. A couple of views that I find useful are “Group by Rating” and “5 Star Documents”. (See below for images) I often use the 5 Star Documents view in a webpart on site homepages.
This SharePoint function can add some additional value without any development time required. It allows users to define what they like and find important. This can be a great function to help drive user adoption of SharePoint too. I will be covering how to display content ratings in search results soon so stay tuned for that blog. No special equipment needed; just extraordinary performance to be gained.
Group by Rating
5 Star Documents
