Rating for documents in SharePoint 2010

In this article we will be seeing how to rate documents in the SharePoint 2010.

SharePoint 2010 introduced a new feature called Rating feature which is used to rate the documents in the document library and the documents can be sorted based on the rating field. Rating the documents will be very useful for the users to search the documents in the SharePoint.

Enable Ratings:

• Go to the Shared Documents => Library Settings => General Settings => Rating Settings.
  
  
   
• In the "Allow items to be rated" select yes and click Ok.
  
  
   
• You may recieve an error as shown in the following.
  
  
   
• The reason for the error is that to update the ratings, a timer job "User Profile Service – Social Rating Synchronization job" belonging to the User Profile Service application is scheduled, so that you must have a User profile Service application connection associated with the web application in which you are enabling the Rating.
   
• Check User Profile Service Application is associated with the web application:
   
  1. Go to Central Administration => Manage Web Applications.
      
  2. Select the web application, and click Service Connections in the ribbon.
     
     
      
  3. In the Configure Service Application Associations check whether the User Profile Service Application is checked.

• Once the User Profile Service Application is associated with the web application and rating is enabled, you will see the Rating column.
   
• To rate a document simply drag your mouse over the number of stars you want to give it and then click the left button.
  
  

• Eventhough you have rated a document you will not see the rating; the reason is that the "User Profile Service – Social Rating Synchronization job" is scheduled on an hourly basis.
   
• If you want to see the ratings immediately go to the timer job and click Run now.