Preview - Wikis in SharePoint 2010

Refers to build 14.0.4006.1010 (BETA 1)

Wiki functionality in SharePoint 2007 was kind of spartan. In this post I’ll have a look what will come with SharePoint 2010.

The Wiki Homepage Feature

When you create a blank site in SharePoint 2010 the homepage (default.aspx) will be a web part page as usual. But now there’s a new feature called “Wiki Page Home Page”.

When you activate the feature it creates a document library called “SitePages”, adds a wiki page named “default.aspx” and set it as the new homepage for the site.

The feature transforms your whole site to a wiki. Every time you create a new page it will create a new wiki page and store it in the “SitePages” lib (similar to the publishing features in 2007).

For sure you can tag Wiki pages as any other page as described in my previous post Managing Metadata in SharePoint 2010.

Content

While in SharePoint you could only write some rich text, you now could upload files (will be stored as a separate file) and add Web Parts.

No joke, you can now add Web Parts at any place within the wiki rich text!

[[Wiki Linking]]

In SharePoint 2010 you will get an intellisense like linking experience. That’s kind of cool :-) Just an enter [[ and press ctrl+space


You can now link easily pages, lists, items, documents and views.

Enterprise Wiki Layouts

Additionally there’s a new Site Collection feature called “Enterprise Wiki Layouts” for creating a large-scale wiki with categories and page layouts.

Seems to be correlated with the publishing infrastructure, because the feature add a new page layout content type. This means you can create wiki page layouts with SharePoint Designer 2010.
Click and see the beautiful new SharePoint 2010 error message.
Never mind this a technical preview and lot of things already work great. Can’t await to continue with the beta in November…