Jacks Blag

Sharepoint Wiki

As previously posted, my team in our organisation has begun experimenting with some of the more free form tools within sharepoint. Being an a small IT department (12 or so employees) we have always had full control over editing and shaping our site, but our activity has always been pretty limited to mimiking windows directories in document libraries and creating lists.

My team, the service delivery team ( responsible for servers, application, desktops and all the network infrastructure), has begun playing with a wiki as a way of capturing knowledge. Sharepoint is not well known for its out of the box wiki functionality. This, I understand, is part of MOSS, not a feature in their free sharepoint services. It is widely considered not a good example of fully featured wiki tool. Indeed some of its features are utterly frustrating, I’ll list these in a moment. But first up I’d like to discuss how we are using the wiki within our small team.

The Wiki has become a work log. We all have dual screens and as I look around the room I can see all three of us have the site open on one screen and are browsing or creating content. Every change, every problem and solution is being noted down on the site. At the moment, for example, I am working on researching an upcoming installation of Microsoft Communicator within our organisation; everything I am learning and applies to our organisation is being stored in articles. Last week I migrated a proxy service off a domain controller and onto a dedicated virtual machine. All the deviations of this server, from fresh OS installation, are now listed. Registry tweeks, packages installed, decisions and justifications are all noted down and linked together. As you are easily able to update it on the fly, the wiki is quickly capturing a comprehensive picture of our network.

It is early days, but the result appears to be a very natural and easy capture of knowledge. Previously the bare minimum may have been put into a word document after the event, and filed away to collect electronic dust. Smaller facts, knowledge and decisions would simply be stored mentally, probably to be forgotten within the week. The Wiki is complimenting our existing and very effective communication very well.

Its highly obvious, but it is very exciting to see the process in action.

Pros and Cons with Sharepoint Wiki. (Not an exhaustive list, just some personal observations)

+ Sharepoint rich text editor is extremely easy to use.
+ You can imbed web-parts into your wiki pages.
+ The wiki is a complete out of the box solution.
+ Its Microsoft, the de-facto standard for the corporate environment, and they are moving a lot of their services towards the sharepoint platform.

- The rich text editor butchers formatting. when copying in from other sources I have to use notepad to strip formatting.
- Adding media, especially images is a complete hassle
- Dot points and tabbing is completely borked.

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