One of my current projects is working with SharePoint wiki’s. We are looking to create a common knowledge base to transition information from one company to another. I just wanted to mention some of the great features of SharePoint’s wiki’s.
I think one of the best features of SharePoint’s wiki’s is the ease in which users can create or update content. The rich text editor makes editing wiki blogs as easy as using Microsoft Word.
Another key feature is being able to link to and create wiki pages within the same site. Here’s a great tutorial on doing that (http://bit.ly/nvpFtZ). What’s great about users creating content in a SharePoint wiki is that it’s created in SharePoint! With SharePoint wiki’s we can take advantage of all the SharePoint features like alerts, version control, content approval and security!
With the easy creation of wiki pages it can become a big mess. With SharePoint’s metadata/columns you can easily group wiki’s together into different categories as well as tagging wiki pages with additional information to make it easier to search for information.
One of the cool things we’ve done with our wiki is to track the teams efficiency and quantify the knowledge of the information being transferred from one business unit to the next. We used SharePoint’s columns to track the number of times a process wiki had been executed as well as the employee executing the wiki.
One of the major drawbacks of the SharePoint wiki’s is that they cannot be easily exported. The SharePoint wiki pages are actually stored as page layouts that have the content of the pages stored in database tables. Including the column in a view and exporting the list to Excel is a possible solution if the wiki content is small, BUT most wiki pages contain more than an Excel cell can handle. It kind of sucks, but that’s the nature of the beast. There are third party solutions that allow you to import/export wiki pages (eg. Bamboo Solutions – Wiki Publisher), but I did find an article that allows for an OOB (Out of the box) export of wiki content. (http://bit.ly/o1M2MJ )
All in all, I do like SharePoint wiki’s.
