Introduction
You might feel this topic is way too straightforward and can be found with a click of a search button. But ever since the release of Modern SharePoint, there are quite a lot of discussions around the Document Rating settings in Modern Team Sites and Modern Communication Sites.
Here, in this blog, you will see a fully explored explanation starting from enabling/disabling the setting in Team sites and at some point also understanding why this free feature is not available in a straightforward way in the Communication site.
Let’s begin then!
Enabling Rating feature in Modern Team site
- In order to perform the below enabling feature actions, you need to have Site collection admin access.
- Under the Site collection feature, make sure to enable SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure
- Under the Manage feature, make sure to enable SharePoint Server Publishing
- Now, to add ratings to your SharePoint library, go to the Library settings.
- Under General Settings, click Rating settings
- Under Allow items in the list to be rated? Click Yes.
- Under Which Voting/rating experience would you like to enable for this list? do either of the following
- Select Likes to let site visitors indicate that they like a document or other list item.
- SharePoint displays the total number of Likes next to the item and, on hover, displays who has liked the item.
- Select Star Ratings to let site visitors rate items with 1 to 5 stars, SharePoint automatically averages the star ratings of multiple visitor responses and displays the result next to the item.
- Click OK.
Disabling Rating feature in Modern Team site
- To remove a rating feature in your document library, go to Library Settings
- Under General Setting, click Rating settings
- Under Allow items in this list to be rated?, click No
- Then click OK.
In the Modern Communication site, the features (SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure and SharePoint Server Publishing) are available but if you try and enable you would end up getting an error message. This is known and on purpose. Why? In the Modern SharePoint experience, communication sites fulfill the same purpose as traditional publishing sites, with no code and simple page creation techniques.
Important points to be noted
If you’re interested to understand and learn more on this topic go to this
link.
After we have learned of why Modern Communication sites don’t offer this feature, there will be a few of you who still be interested in enabling Rating settings on document libraries. Well, I have that covered too here. I came across a very interesting Q&A section in Microsoft’s TechCommunity forum and found the answers.
Please refer to Dave Heffernan’s reply where he provides step-by-step instructions to activate the rating feature using PowerShell provided by Microsoft,
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/sharepoint/communication-site-document-library-rating-settings/m-p/162984/highlight/true#M14615
In the end, I would suggest everyone who wants the feature to be back in the Modern communication sites to upvote in the below SharePoint UserVoice community,
https://sharepoint.uservoice.com/forums/329214-sites-and-collaboration/suggestions/33237925-modern-page-ratings
https://sharepoint.uservoice.com/forums/329214-sites-and-collaboration/suggestions/20149729-add-rating-settings-to-document-libraries
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