What is the point of a wiki, anyway?

With all the possibilities that SharePoint lists and libraries offer in the area of teamwork and collaboration, you might be asking yourself why you need wikis as well?

We all know about the success of Wikipedia and often this limits our thinking of wikis to knowledge management. To help you recognise the benefits of wiki technology, please read through:

The key advantages

• Workload is split among many authors - everyone is a specialist in something
• Easy to edit and format without HTML knowledge
• Linking content is very easy
• Access to data from any computer in the world - all you need is a browser
• Version histories allow you to roll back content on a page by page level and view changes visually
• Faster search results
• Users can be notified on changes to specific articles, or on whole libraries

True collaboration

Work together on larger documents by splitting the content into smaller elements, with each author concentrating on their own wiki article. You can then either leave the content online in the wiki library as the completed project or you can export this using the Wiki Extensions to a PDF file.

What about other wiki systems? Why should I use SharePoint?

There are plenty of wiki solutions on the market, but few of these work together with SharePoint. And even if they do, most require you to run both systems in parallel and simply offer you webparts to search or view your external wiki.

The BlueBridge Wiki Extensions use SharePoint's native wiki engine, and add new features. So you have the following advantages:

• Full integration in your existing SharePoint environment
• Less administrative work needed because no extra engine has to be installed and managed
• Solid document management
• Advanced search possibilities, including integration with the overall SharePoint Search
• Interface is familiar to SharePoint users
• Along with the BlueBridge Wiki Extensions, you will find all the main features you'd expect in a wiki
• Custom functionality can easily be programmed using existing knowledge of Microsoft technologies