How to turn off Tags and Notes in SharePoint 2010

It is possible that in many projects and companies Tags and Notes feature of  SharePoint 2010 might not be required completely and it is possible to turn them off without losing the other social features in SharePoint. I am glad that Microsoft SharePoint Team did not glued it.

There are two ways to turn it off using the graphical interface :

At Farm Level :

• Go to Central Administration > System Settings >  Manage Farm Features.
• Look for Social Tags and Note Board Ribbon Controls and Deactivate it.

Ae User Group Level :

• Go to Central Administration > Manage Profile Service: > User Profile Service Application > People
• Click on Manage User Permissions and you will see a screen similar as below :

• Here you can disable Use Social Features to turn off  Tags and Notes for that particular user, group or type.  As you can see here personal Feature, Personal Site and Social feature are three different things here.

It should be also possible to turn this off at site level by editing couple of master page files in SharePoint sites by both using PowerShell and API calls. I will update this as soon as I get my hands on it.