Rating Settings

This page allows the library administrator to decide whether items in the list or library can be rated. If Allow Items in This List to Be Rated? is set to Yes, users with read permission level of higher can provide ratings in a list or library. If ratings are enabled for a list or library, two ratings fields are added to the content types available for the list: average rating and number of ratings. In addition, a column Rating (0-5) is added to the default view.

Ratings are a powerful tool that encourages users to rate documents or list items on a scale of 0 to 5. Although it is impossible to enforce “responsible” use of ratings, users should be informed that SharePoint does in fact track who rates documents how, and in fact, other users can see what ratings a specific user applies from their My Site from the My Newsfeed tab. So if, for example, a user chooses to rate everything as a 1, other users will see this and possibly apply social pressure on the user to be more constructive in his ratings. If enough users apply ratings, the number of ratings will make the frivolous ratings less significant through the power of averages. Figure 20.18 gives an example of a document library where a view was created that sorts the documents by the value in the Rating (0-5) column. This view could be set as a default, so users would immediately see the “most popular” documents in the library as ranked by their co-workers.

Figure 20.18. A document library view sorted by ratings.

The use of ratings from My Site is covered in Chapter 23, “Leveraging Social Networking Tools in SharePoint 2010.”