SharePoint Wiki

I've had an opportunity to try SharePoint's Wiki (SP Wiki) for about two weeks. It is easy to use but utterly featureless. I can only wonder what Microsoft was thinking when they included this no frills item and pretended it was a Web 2.0 collaboration tool. (You can see an SP Wiki online at the University of Missouri's website)

KM Space is quite unhappy with SP Wiki because it doesn't adequately communicate incremental changes to pages like Wikipedia notifications do. I've not tried this yet, but apparently SP Wiki sends you a copy of the entire new page, rather than pointing out specific changes to the text.

Lawrence Liu is tired of hearing complaints about the SP Wiki. Liu says that users should look at SharePoint overall and be amazed at the package and not pick apart its elements which can't compete with separate tools available on the market today. Seems to me he is satisficing (and rude). Liu might as well get used to the unruly hoardes, because we're unhappy with SP Wiki and unlikely to stop complaining. Maybe this is standard fare for Microsoft, to put out a crappy product and say it is a marvel, but I'm truly surprised that anyone would put this out there and say it is a Cadillac. It's a Geo.

Now I'm wondering how I will ever transfer two weeks of input into another product, if my employer will ever add a different Wiki tool to SharePoint.

I'd Rather Be Writing discusses the use of columns to force the use of metatags. It seems cumbersome and not all that successful, from what this blog says. I'm not impressed.

Jackie Bodine briefly ran a SharePoint blog which included a discussion of how to add columns and tables to an SP Wiki. After a month or so she dropped the blog and that was about a year and a half ago. Maybe she recognized that the product was weak and decided it wasn't worth its own blog?

InformationWeek has an October 2007 article announcing that Atlassian, which produces the Wiki product Confluence, was teaming up with Microsoft to make a seamless connector between Confluence and SharePoint. A video embedded at the Classic Scoble Show contains an interview with Atlassian folks who explain many of the interesting features that this connector will provide, including a search engine, personal Web page and blog, and the capability to embed Confluence Wiki pages in SharePoint. Sounds promising. Atlassian has its own blog article about the release.

Of course InfoWorld says you probably already paid a lot of money for Microsoft products, so you might as well make use of the Wiki that is provided for free in SharePoint. Now that's an endorsement.