I was at a client site yesterday and they wanted to set up a Wiki. Now I knew from reading various posts over my time that they weren't as great as some of the open source wikis out there. For me, Wikis certainly are a "tick in the box" as I discussed in my articles on SharePointMagazine.net.
Some of the limitations I found were:
- Insert Image
Something that seemed so simple was that if you wanted to add an image to a wiki page you would need to:
- upload the image somewhere in SharePoint (or have a url to somewhere it's published elsewhere)
- then edit the wiki page
- click the insert image button and paste the URL in
This is not great for End Users or anyone to be honest. Even with MOSS you don't get the Global Asset Picker like you do with Web Content Management pages in the Publishing Site Template. - Wiki Comments
A lot of main stream wikis have the ability for Users to comment on content in Wiki pages without actually editing the content directly. This is common with things like the MSDN Technet articles now also where you can leave your comments at the bottom. - Wiki Home
This bugs me heaps, if you click the crumb trail in a wiki it actual goes to the Wiki SharePoint List view rather than the WIki Home Page. This can be confusing to Users and is not really what's expected.
I still rolled out the Wiki in SharePoint for all the other advantages of it:
- being part of the Platform and therefore part of their Disaster Recovery scenario;
- part of their federated search (granted it could be added as a content source);
- common interface for easy adoption by users;
- use of the SharePoint APIs and Web services to inspect data
- (and possible export it if you decide to migrate to something else)
- use of the SharePoint Object Security Model
- inherits look and feel of parent site without any skinning
- easily provisioned by any Site Owners
- and more...
Extending the OOTB WIki
- David Mann also provides some tips here on the OOTB wikis to customise it so it works how you'd expect it to.
- Another bit of a rant on why Wikis aren't that great can be found here too.
- There was some work going on at CKS:EWE, but this seems to have gone quiet although David Mann did announce that he would pick the ball up again recently.
- There is a Wiki WebPart 2.0 out there that adds some features including a method of uploading images to a wiki page and automatically adding them to pages at the bottom.
- Atlassian also announced integration with their product into SharePoint which does give you heaps of additional integration.
vNext
Hopefully this is an area that they look into for SharePoint 2009 as they push SharePoint as being a Collaboration product, but the Wikis have serious limitations, to the point where I was very tempted to push using Word Documents in a Document Library and use Document Collaboration to allow easy upload of Images and formatting of content.