Aug 01, 2016

SharePoint 2010 provides 2 options for tagging; I like it and Tags & Notes.

Although they are normally used for private use, they have the potential to facilitate social collaboration.

In a nutshell, you can go to a web page and click on I like it on the top right of the page, or select an item in a document library and click on I like it on the Library tab. This creates a tag called I like it which acts like a bookmark. To see your bookmarks you can go to My Profile from the drop down on the top right of your page and click on Tags & Notes. By clicking on I like it, SharePoint shows you all the content that you have bookmarked this way.

You can also bookmark content by having a more meaningful keyword than just "I like it". You can do this by clicking on Tags & Notes to tag it. This way SharePoint allows you to create your own keyword which makes more sense to you. Usually you name this bookmark according to the category of the object, for example, Technical Specs or Programming, etc. When you tag something, the keyword you use is saved in SharePoint so that other users can re-use it for their own tagging. This helps users to avoid typing the same keyword differently. For example, when someone tries to tag something Technical Specifications he will be presented by the keyword Technical Specs because someone else had added that tag before, therefore multiple forms of the same keyword will be avoided.

You can make a tag private by ticking the Private box. This will force SharePoint not to advertise to others that this object has been tagged by you, however the keyword will still be saved for re-use by others.

Notes work the same way except that they are designed to provide a comment about an object rather than to categorize them like tags do.

One of the aspects of tagging is in Social Collaboration. If a user tags an object, he can also find out who else has tagged it because SharePoint advertises all those users at the bottom of the Tags dialog box (provided the tags are not private). This means that they either have similar or opposite interests. The same goes with Notes.

A user can also go to his My Profile > Tags and Notes and click on a tag keyword to see the list of all objects tagged with that keyword. He can then click on the keyword next to one of the listed objects to see all other object having the same tag. In that page the user can click on View people who are following this tag to find out about those who have the same interest on this tag.

As you can see finding people with similar interests is not that difficult in SharePoint.

You can also let people know your interests by typing keywords in the Interests box in your My Profile > My Newsfeed > My Interests > Interests: so if you type "Technical Specs" in there, SharePoint will show you objects that are tagged with Technical Specs.

I advise you to go and explore tagging. You’ll find some interesting features.

Hope this has helped.

Cyrus Mohseni