Our first wiki was an import of our existing knowledge management wiki into the SharePoint platform. I wrote about that wiki in a previous post on Making Wikis Work - Success Factors. That wiki had been very successful on the external platform and I expect it will continue to be successful on the SharePoint wiki platform. There have already been several edits.
The downside to moving the wiki was that all of the links in the wiki broke. The links to our intranet were already broken as a result of the upgrade of the intranet from SharePoint 2003 to SharePoint 2007. Now the internal wikis links are broken.
We had debated on whether to move the wiki. The winning argument for the move was that "we need to eat what we cook." If we are going to pitch the use of wikis in SharePoint, we needed to be using them ourselves.
We also launched a second wiki for managing HotDocs and our HotDocs templates. The vision for this wiki was to create the manual for each of the HotDocs templates and to share information among the HotDocs developers. The wiki page becomes the item returned on a search for the HotDocs template.
We found one great feature of wikis in SharePoint is their ability to combine structured and unstructured information on the wiki page. At the bottom of the image above you see the words "Template In Production." I had created a new column/field in the wiki page library called "Template." In the Template column I allowed for the choices of "In Production", "Under Development" and "N/A." You can edit the field right from the wiki page.
By adding the structured content we can also create views of the wiki page library to expose content, rather than having to rely solely on links in the wiki pages. In the image below, the sections labeled "HotDocs Templates", "HotDocs Templates Under Development" and "HotDocs Wiki Recent Edits" are all separate views of the wiki pages library.
I would be interested in hearing more about the different KM experiences when using Sharepoint as opposed to a wiki. Wikis are obviously leveraging Web 2.0 technologies and represent the future for the ABM (anything but Microsoft) crowd, however Sharepoint has an applications framework that has some appeal as well. Of course the latter may only be viable where there is an IT presence to drive it.
ReplyDeleteWhy reducing KM to Wikis? You can share knowledge as well as content using SharePoint! For categorizing any SharePoint items or documents cross-site based on centrally managed taxonomies and browse it by default navigation, category tree or A-Z directory you can use the Taxonomy Extension found at:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.sharepartxxl.com/products/taxonomy/default.aspx
Related items can be shown in the item's detail view, cross-site category-based meta-data lists from different source lists and types can be subscribed by RSS or email. With that extension the SharePoint portal really can become a place to share knowledge as well as content.
Just check it out. / Frank