Rating and Liking features are a part of the social features available in SharePoint. When the Rating feature is enabled in SharePoint library, the users can rate the library items and provide feedback about how relevant the item is. Using this information, the site administrators can derive analysis about how useful the contents are and how relevant they are.
![]()
Similarly, we can enable the Like feature in Facebook, so as to allow the users to depict their interest in the content. A user can Like/Unlike the library items by clicking Like button.
![]()
In this article, we will see how to enable Rating feature and Like functionality in SharePoint as a part of the social features. Let’s take the shared documents library to implement Rating/Like feature.
![]()
Go to the document library settings. From the settings page, select ‘Rating Settings’ option.
![]()
Rating settings page allows us to either select Likes/Star Ratings option. We can choose either one of the options and not both.
![]()
We should also set the radio button ‘Allow items in this list to be rated?’ to ‘Yes’.
![]()
Once the selection has been made, click OK. Now, let's head back to the document library. Like feature has been enabled in this list. This will add a new column “Number of Likes” to the library. Clicking Like button will add a like to the document. A user can like the content only once.
![]()
Once the document has been liked, the count of likes will be updated in the column. Clicking on unlike will remove the previously added like.
![]()
Similarly, we can implement ratings feature in the library. Earlier, we had selected the Like feature. Now, let’s select the ‘Star Ratings’ option.
![]()
This will introduce the rating feature for the library and will add a new column ‘Rating’ in the library. The users can rate from 1-5, 5 being the highest rating.
![]()
Once the rating is given to the document, the values are stored in the social tagging database. SharePoint Timer jobs play a vital role in aggregating the social ratings and updating it to the content database. If we go to Central Administration -> Monitoring -> Review Job definitions, we can see User profile Service - Social Rating Synchronization’ timer job, which is used to synchronize the ratings between the social rating database and the content database. By default, it is set to run hourly.
![]()
We can see the Social DB from the SQL Server Management Studio. All the social features of SharePoint are stored in the Social database.
![]()
If we expand the social database, we can see in detail; the tables within the database. The social rating tables and social tag tables are some of the central repositories, where social information regarding rating and tagging will be stored.
![]()
Summary
Thus, we saw how to enable and work with Rating and Like features in SharePoint Server 2016.