As soon as I mention the word "wiki", the first thing most people will think of is Wikipedia. This is hardly surprising, considering that the site has been one of the ten most visited sites in the world for some years now. However, this can often limit our thinking. So when we see that SharePoint offers wiki functionality, we immediately reduce it to glossaries and knowledge bases, without seeing the advantages that it can bring us in other areas.

Since the launch of SharePoint 2007, we have noticed a trend of organisations using wikis for a number of purposes, the most common of which being documentation. In this article, we'll be looking at the advantages that wikis can bring and then one or two practical tips on how to use them.

Why use wikis?

Before discovering wikis, we used to write documentation in Microsoft Word. Word is, of course, an outstanding tool for word processing (I'm using it to write this article!) but it's not always the best choice. Perhaps I'm alone in this, but when I use Word, I tend to spend more time on formatting the document (making sure the margins are right, sliding the images to the right places etc.) than I do on writing the content. Furthermore, my articles always look different to those written by colleagues and collaboration is often a nightmare. Either we all get confused by document versions, or one person takes charge of writing the document and ends up writing about subjects in which he/she is not a specialist. Finally, we have the "typo rule": What happens if you see a spelling mistake when reading a document on your SharePoint server? Let's be honest, most of us won't update it. We look at it and say: "I don't really want to create a whole new version of this document for the sake of one spelling mistake".

This psychological barrier is much lower in wikis. Firstly, the content is split into articles/chapters and not all in one massive Word file. Secondly, people see Word files as "holy" and won't touch them for fear of getting something wrong - especially with all the warnings "are you absolutely sure that you want to edit this document?"; whereas wiki articles are much easier to change and have a large "Edit" button above them to encourage users to do so. Everyone is an author and a specialist, leading to higher levels of trust and ownership in the team. Information can be kept up to date easily and SharePoint notifications easily applied to keep you informed about any changes. Lastly, the lack of advanced formatting options (like in Word) saves time and helps boost uniformity, because it is hard for users to make large changes to the format.

How to use wikis

In this article, I'll spare you the step-by-step guide of how to create a wiki library. Instead, I'll go through a few questions you should be asking.

The first is crucial to the success of the wiki: How are you going to work with permissions? This depends very much on your team and exactly what you are trying to achieve. Some of our customers have very open wikis, where everyone in the team can edit everything. This is great as it is fast and it fosters trust in the team, but it can be dangerous with more sensitive content. Other customers have more complex environments, thinking carefully about exactly who can do what. You may have to create new groups and manually change permission levels, and also think about whether you need some sort of workflow. For example, we created a workflow for one of our customers to change the permissions on an individual article every time its status was changed. Articles were assigned to specific authors and only they could see the article until it was submitted (other authors could then view and edit the article once it had been approved). This way, we were able to control and manage the wiki in a very precise way, which is exactly what some companies require. It is not advisable to use item level permissions without a workflow, however, as it is very easy to make mistakes and very hard to administer.

The second question you should ask yourself is how you want to structure your wiki and where it should be located. Central knowledge bases are generally best located in their own Enterprise Wiki site collection, but in most cases, documentation should be found on the same site as the product or project you are documenting. This allows you to work effectively with other collaboration tools, making sure that information is found in context. When writing the wiki itself, remember to use [[wiki links]] frequently, as they will help the user navigate around the documentation quickly. Use headings on wiki pages to help split up articles into manageable sections, without having to create a new wiki article for every paragraph.

Advanced Features

So we've established that SharePoint wikis can be a really good way of creating and managing documentation and specifications, but there are still one or two elements that are missing. This is where the BlueBridge Wiki Extensions for SharePoint come in. We originally developed these several years ago after hearing from our customers that they needed more functionality in the wikis, and the software is now being used by hundreds of thousands of users worldwide.

Firstly, documentation has to be shared. SharePoint Wikis are useful when sharing within a team, but if that documentation then needs to be sent to a customer, then a different format is needed. The Wiki Extensions provide a PDF export tool for this very reason, allowing you to save the whole wiki or individual articles as PDF files. The export format can even be defined using XSLT technology.

Other features include text snippets, icon galleries and the web parts, for example for showing documents or links that are relevant to that article. These can be added automatically to new articles to ensure that the look & feel of your wiki remains constant. Our navigation tools are also especially helpful in documentation scenarios, where a certain amount of structure is desirable.

Conclusion

As you can see, wikis in SharePoint are about much more than simple knowledge bases. Documentation is one area where you can really improve efficiency and communication by using wikis: It may take a short while to get used to the idea, but you'll start to reap the rewards soon enough.

If you have any questions about using wikis for documentation or indeed for any other purposes, then please come over to our stand at the European SharePoint Conference, where we'd be happy to help.

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