Rob Howard

Wiki Wiki

Thursday, August 28 2008 - community-server

We're putting the final touches on the Community Server 2008 Fall Release - officially this is Community Server 2008.5. 

One of the new additions I'm excited about is the inclusion of a Wiki. Wikis are available as both a stand-alone solution, similar to blogs, and are also fully integrated into Community Server groups.

I wanted to share some of the details about our Wiki solution:

1. Rich Editor - Instead of requiring you to know wiki-syntax, such as what is found in media wiki, we chose to make our wiki solution simple and approachable for the every day user. We included support for our rich editor so all of the styling, images, etc. can be done without needing to know wiki syntax.

2. Support for basic Wiki Syntax -  While using the rich editor does make our wiki simpler, we still wanted to support wiki syntax where it makes sense. For example, if you are authoring a document you can use [[my new page]] to create a link to a new page. We also support piping and category options as well. For example:

[[community server wiki|Wiki Overview]]

3. Tab based UI - wiki content is broken up into 4 tabs: Article - the published version; Edit - edit the current version; Comments - list of comments; History - content history with comparison ability:

4. Structure - our wiki does support unstructured content, but also fully supports structured content where articles are children of parent pages. There is an infinite amount of nesting which allows you to replicate whatever structure you want within your wiki:

5. Permissions and Moderation - permissions and moderation tools provide community owners with capability to control content when needed.

6. Email notifications and RSS -  wikis support subscriptions via email - so you can be notified when a wiki you are following is updated - and you can also subscribe through RSS.

7. Social Voting - we've also added some social voting tools to help rank or show the value of different pages. The idea of course is to help important content get bubbled up:

The new wiki is also fully integrated with Harvest Report so you can pull out meaningful business intelligence around your wiki. I'll post some details about some of the updates we've made to Harvest in the coming weeks as well.