Sharepoint Wikis

Question

Ok, I\'ve seen a few posts that mention a few other posts about not using SP wikis because they suck.

Since we are looking at doing our wiki in SP, I n

Answer 1

We run into this topic all the time, and the first question I have taken to asking people is "Why do you need a wiki"? Almost always the answers are things "ease of editing", "multiple contributors", and "Word is to heavyweight". Very rarely have we seen anyone ask for what I consider to be uniquely wiki-like features (special "magic" markup, fine grained version history showing changes, etc). Also, they usually want some kind of categorization of things, not just completely free-form pages.

In the SharePoint world these things should scream "list" at you if you've been working with the tool for a while. There is basically no particular reason to use a wiki for these knowledge base-style applications, especially since "ease of editing" usually directly conflicts with the idea of learning a special markup language for most user. Through a couple of rich-text columns in there, and you're all set. If you really don't like the built-in rich-text editor (yes the image uploading process is clunky and it doesn't work in Firefox), have someone in your organization go drop the 8 Benjamins and go get the RadEditor for SharePoint. It should pretty much handle those concerns.

Generally once we've gotten over the "but it needs to be a wiki" dogma, we've had pretty good customer reception to just using lists. In some cases, where a little more of a page templating facility was required we turned to using the WCM features of MOSS, which requires a little more up-front thought about templates, but also has a better out of the box experience for things like content snippets and image handling.