Tags, Notes and I Like it : Social SharePoint 2010

Its a common need that when you have a website which features membership, lot of features around members are expected. One such feature that we had always  missed in SharePoint 2003 was how do you  bookmark links or talk about a page with other members by sharing comment about it.  If you had been active on Internet, Stumbleupon was one such site which had this built in the core. The users can like a page share it with others, review it and add tags to it.  The same idea has been incorporated in SharePoint 2010. 

In short, a page can liked by a user, can add notes  and tags ( Public and Private ) to it  and if public can be seen by other users. As a matter of fact you can even use this feature in any external pages. 

Two icons, I like it and Tags& Notes,  are now available in all the pages of site you create.  When a user clicks on I like it, it is saved as bookmark and when he click on Tags and Notes, small snippets and description can be added to the page which can be set as  private or public by the user. The tags set as public can be used to suggest tags to other users and can be used in search which I will talk about in separate post. Tags can be added to a page or a document. 

Features : 

• Tag Cloud
• Receive updates in the Newsfeed when your colleagues add tags / notes to documents and pages.
• If you are following a keyword as an interest, you can also receive an update when anyone applies that tag to content that you have permission to view. Same goes for Notes
• It is also possible to find out who is using the same tag by click on it. Each Tag has its own profile and you can who is talking about it, track which pages get the same tags etc.

 How to access tags,notes and bookmarks  again ?

Click on the link on top right which displays your name and then click on My Profile. Now select Tags and Notes. You can completely manage tags and notes from here. 

You can sort, delete, public, privte and also filter according to the date. 

How an Administrator can manage and control these tags ?

It is possible to manage them but I was disappointed not to find them for each site collection, Instead the control sites under  Central Administration > Application management > Manage Service applications > User Profile Service Application > Manage Social Tags and Notes.  

 You can search according to user, date, site, keyword matching and delete them. This is useful to control if anytime somebody spams a system. 

 There are few features which I think should have been there : 

• Site Collection level Tags and Notes Management.
• User reporting feature which can help administrator get feedback on certain pages which might not be proper.
• A warning system which can send emails to user if his public tagging is not right.

Next post I will take deep dive inside Tags and Notes to see how much more control a user can have. Social Networking is now inside products used in corporate world but with that said we need features and API to control them to a greater extent.

Related : How to turn off  Tags and Notes in SharePoint 2010