How is SharePoint as a Wiki
Microsoft SharePoint is a great place for collaboration. Companies build so many different kinds of things with SharePoint as a central engine. It makes a great repository for sharing reports, lists, PowerPivot sets, and many other kinds of documents as well.
Did you know that SharePoint also supports Microsoft’s version of a Wiki? Now that you do, why would you want it?
A Wiki site is self-organizing. Pages are defined through links that have to be fulfilled (edited and content entered into the link). It contains the ability for change management (permissions) and even change tracking so you can see content over time should you find it important.
The reason a Wiki is useful in conjunction with SharePoint is the fact that SharePoint server provides secure access and permissions without requiring another tool to maintain users and permissions. The Wiki extends the capabilities of SharePoint by providing a hierarchical organization for LOTs of content. Simply uploading many documents to SharePoint is not the same as having a Wiki that may be edited by many different users on different pages without conflict. Moreover, searching for information is in a single place.
Maintaining the content is snappy through a web interface. It is simple, straight forward, and doesn’t require any special code enabled in your browser to download documents, or edit them in a browser. It works in browsers other than Internet Explorer.
So, if you already have SharePoint, you may want to enable the wiki and get a feel for some of the things it can do for you. If you don’t own a SharePoint license, you can look into SharePoint on Azure to check things out. There are dozens of Wiki engines out there. If you want to be a little more adventurous, check out http://www.wikimatrix.org to compare many of the Wiki engines out there. For the open systems ones, I would be sure to note when was the last release date. Some have not changed since 2009 or earlier.
How are you using the SharePoint Wiki in your world? Share your tips in comments below, or drop an Email to btaylor@sswug.org.
Cheers,
Ben
$$SWYNK$$
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