I spent some time recently talking with Richard Riley, the group product manager for SharePoint.He started off by asking me if I knew that you could build web sites with SharePoint. Phew, a question I could answer.

“Yes,” I said, even though it’s not the first thing I think of when it comes to SharePoint. I think of the Intranets that has made SharePoint a $1.3 billion business for Microsoft.

But the Web is surrounding Intranets these days. It serves as the open network that fits loosely coupled systems into Intranet environments. And from Microsoft’s viewpoint, the Web is serving as an education network to make Intranets more viable.

Riley said that the sites developed through SharePoint include rating systems and a tagging structure. People see tagging all over the Web. The Web has taught them how to tag. That learning is driving behavior inside the enterprise and making tagging more viable and a key component of SharePoint 2010.

SharePoint 2010–the just-arriving new version– has a number of tagging capabilities that can be controlled by IT administrators.

According to Microsoft TechNet, they includes the following:

• Social tags, which enable users to save items of interest, organize all information for a project, and connect to others who share their interests.
• The Note Board, which enables users to add comments about Web pages, documents, and library items to be tracked in a central location.
• Ratings, which are social tags that allow users to assess the value of content against a scale, for example, one through five stars.
• Bookmarklets, which enable users to add tags and notes to pages that are outside a SharePoint environment. For example, if users add tags to a page on an Internet Web site, those tags and notes can appear on the Tags and Notes tab of their My Site Web site.

The tags do not make discovery radically better all by themselves, but they do help.

For example, the new search in SharePoint is enriched through tagging. People can tag a Word document. As it flows through the process, the search technology goes through the content and enriches it with data that you prescribe. Data is added to the document, providing it with a richer set of information that was not originally in the document.

In my next post, I’ll take a look at some of the benefits to IT that social tagging provides in SharePoint 2010.

(Alex Williams blogs about enterprise issues for ReadWriteWeb.)