Wiki wiki

Recently, I was introduced to Sharepoint's wiki section (in terms of it being a subset of the larger SharePoint system). Being well versed in writing wiki pages under Trac, I tried it out with great trepidation. A lot of this trepidation comes from the fact that Microsoft is notorious for poorly implementing a product that has already existed as open source.

My take: It's not completely useless.

For someone with no previous experience with wiki editing in other environments, it might be considered an ok system. However, it has a serious amount of growing up to do.

Let's start with the interface. First, the interface demands that you run IE. If the server detects that you are running another browser, it penalizes you by downgrading the user interface significantly. For Firefox users, you can work around this by installing the IE tab extension and setting up Sharepoint to always run in an IE tab. Also, for Firefox users, there's some settings that also help with avoiding repeated authentication. prompting.

Under the IE-only controls (which is really the only ones you'll use since the plain text HTML markup interface will pretty much drive you off), you will experience editing similar to that under MS-Word. In fact, it appears that this was the singular focus of the Sharepoint team. Not only do you have the basics of font size and font styling, you also have access to all fonts on your workstation (because access to Wingdings 9 is clearly a must have...forget that it shows up as an unrecognized font to everyone else....). There also exists the ability to insert tables and pictures in nearly the identical manner to that as Word.

Microsoft implemented 2 features that allow them to call this a wiki. Both were implemented in an exceedingly basic manner.

First, like most wiki's, the post can be edited by any member of the group and a version history of the post is kept to allow for rollback. However, I am very disappointed in that it lacks a post preview function and the ability to tag posts with keywords.

Second, the Sharepoint wiki allows you to create a forward wiki link by enclosing text in brackets (such as [[Completely New Page]] ). This works ok, but it lacks the ability to change the text associated with the link (unless you instead make it a hyperlink).

My biggest disappointment is that the system is immature when compared to other wiki products. Take, for example, Trac (my preferred system). Here's a list of features that I regularly use that are lacking from SharePoint:

• preview pages
• tagging / tag clouds
  
• inter-system fast linking
• ticket/task links (with strikeout when item is closed)
  
• source code repository linking / changeset linking
  
• auto-creation of page outline / indexes
• wiki macros
• syntax highlighting
• page change e-mail notification (page subscription)
  
• external site inline includes
• attachments

Again, it's not that Microsoft has implemented these things wrong or implemented them in an entirely incompatible way, it's simply an immature product that will probably not include features like this for at least two major version cycles. Also, Trac benefits from its extensible plug-in system. At least 3 of the features listed above come from plug-ins I have applied to our system. To be fair, the argument can be made that Sharepoint lacks certain features of Trac (such as integration with a source code repository). However, that doesn't prevent them from offering features to integrate their existing systems including the blog section, discussion forums, calendar and tasks.

Other news:

Whew, I took one week of vacation, but apparently decided to take a 2 week blog vacation. Hope my readership was not completely lost and gone ;-).

If you think of any topics you'd like me to discuss here, send 'em my way. This in no way guarantees that I'll write about it, but it might help me to replenish the idea pool.

My apologies to everyone I lost on this post due to its highly technical nature.

Have a great week!