Turn on Ratings Feature in SharePoint 2010

Having just installed a fresh copy of SharePoint 2010, I of course wanted to immediately use the new Ratings feature (i.e. Netflix style ratings on list/library items). However, for some reason I could not find any reference to ratings in central admin or site settings. No way to turn it on, activate it, add a column, nothing. So what did I do?

Powershell to the rescue.

I wanted to enable a feature, so I did:

get-help *enable* and found the cmdlet called "Enable-SPFeature"

then I looked up the ratings feature identity online and found this blog post http://blogs.msdn.com/b/mcsnoiwb/archive/2010/01/07/features-and-their-guid-s-in-sp2010.aspx. Cool! Now I have my command:

enable-spfeature -identity 915c240e-a6cc-49b8-8b2c-0bff8b553ed3 -url http://servername

Voila! Now I have "Rating Settings" in all lists/libraries. Still wish I knew why Ratings wasn't there in the first place, but this is a good example of using some of the built in Powershell cmdlets for SharePoint.