Forum Discussion

Jan_Steberl's avatar
Jan_Steberl
Former Employee
Mar 28, 2023

Now in public preview: Future of wiki and Notes in Teams

Description

We are announcing that Wiki's will be retired from Teams starting January 2024. We are offering note taking capabilities within Teams channels using the included OneNote notebook provided for each team.

With this release, users have an option to export their wiki content to OneNote notebooks in Teams standard channel. After exporting users can go to the Notes tab to collaborate using OneNote in channels while Wiki is read only after export.

 

Why are we moving to a new note taking experience?

  • This new functionality provides an improved note taking experience over Wiki. Some of the improvements are:
    • Easy collaboration across the team
    • View all channel notes in a team in one place organized within single notebook
    • Rich editing with typing, ink annotations, highlighting, file attachments, etc.
    • Easy recall & search for channel notes within OneNote

 

Plan to enable OneNote Notes in Teams channel and retire Wiki

  • Users now have the option to export their Wiki content to OneNote Notebooks or they can continue to read/write their existing Wiki. Post export users can continue to collaborate in Notes tab in channels and have a copy of older Wiki content available for reference. When Wikis are exported each page in Wiki will appear as a page in OneNote Notebook section. Users can’t create new Wikis in new channel experience; for note taking we suggest using OneNote.
  • For new channels Notes will be available as default tab soon. For now, user can create Notes tab manually using add a tab option.

 

We request you to try out the new Wiki export experience and share your feedback.

 

How to try out the experience

  1. In Teams, go to whatever channel has the wiki you want to export.
  2. In the Wiki tab, select Get details > Export to Notes > Finish.
  3. Go to the Notes tab to access your content.
 

 

Read more about the change here - https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/export-a-wiki-to-a-onenote-notebook-8cd8ab0c-2314-42b0-a1d0-5c6c4c5e1547?storagetype=stage#bkmk_wikideprecationfaq

 

Flighting status

Available in public preview

 

How to enable

This config change is available to everyone.

 

Supported clients and platforms

Windows

macOS

iOS

Android

Linux

Chrome

Firefox

Safari

Edge

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

 

How does this feature impact the existing experience?

Users can continue to access their Wiki as is, no change in existing content until general availability when Wiki content will retire.  

 

Known issues

None

 

Known limitations

  • Post export users may see some formatting change and dark mode is not supported
  • Export is only supported from standard channels, from Private channels user need to manually copy & move content.

 

 

Enable your Teams client for the public preview 

 

  1. First, IT admins need to set an update policy that turns on Show preview features. Learn how at https://docs.microsoft.com/MicrosoftTeams/public-preview-doc-updates.  
  2. Users then choose to join the public preview individually. See https://support.microsoft.com/office/get-early-access-to-new-teams-features-a6e387fe-1cad-4f90-ad78-1a311c77b36d for instructions. 

 

Send us your feedback 

Got feedback on features in the public preview or other areas of Teams? Let us know straight from Teams via Help Give feedback This is on the bottom left of the your client.

 

 

Thank you,

Preview Team

Quality & Customer Obsession, Microsoft Teams

76 Replies

  • mattias-skog's avatar
    mattias-skog
    Iron Contributor
    Agree, the functionality is terrible! The least you could expect is that when you change channel and go to notes is that it would open the correct page in the notes but it doesn't. And what about meeting notes wikis?
  • girazuzta's avatar
    girazuzta
    Copper Contributor
    I've just tried this out
    I dont like it
    Improve OneNote first
  • EricBBDO's avatar
    EricBBDO
    Iron Contributor
    It's clear from the reasoning that they did no UX research. How embarrassing, but on brand.
  • EricBBDO's avatar
    EricBBDO
    Iron Contributor

    Jan_Steberl It's so sad that a platform this wildly bad at presenting information and mostly incapable of visual communication is getting rid of the only tool that can structure content. You'd think they'd be offering more tools, better tools and maybe even hiring designers to make the platform better (ok that's a stretch for MS) but this is downright offensive. Notes is a very different product and is not designed to present content to other people. As limited and frustrating as Wiki is, it's still way better at presenting information than any other tool in Teams. I hate Wiki, but removing it and not offering to replace it with a similar tool built for education or documentation contexts is so wildly irresponsible and alienating only MS would be bold enough to break their clients workflows so carelessly and abruptly. It's mind-boggling that MS is so anti-design.

    • rich1628's avatar
      rich1628
      Brass Contributor
      Those objecting to the removal of Wiki in Teams (and it's replacement with OneNote) can show their support on Microsoft's official feedback site, it might get more attention from Microsoft there: https://feedbackportal.microsoft.com/feedback/idea/3e6e4550-00e9-ed11-a81c-0022484e6a77
  • jeff_roman's avatar
    jeff_roman
    Brass Contributor

    Jan_Steberl 

    I use the Wiki tab extensively to hold FAQs for processes in my role as a Principal Process Improvement Consultant. I don't see how OneNote would be able to have the same level of usefulness, especially as I would need to have some sort of team OneNote with the same permissions controls for access that I have in Teams. Can you PLEASE tell me why you're eliminating the functionality?

     

    Thank you.

     

    Jeff

    • JasmineRuth's avatar
      JasmineRuth
      Copper Contributor
      Same. The Wiki works fantastic for Processes/SOPs. The OneNote is not nearly as nice, no subchapters, etc. I hate it.
  • rich1628's avatar
    rich1628
    Brass Contributor
    A Wiki is different from Note taking. I've been using a Wiki to give end users a bit of background about a Team so they understand the purpose of a Team and what the expected conventions are. A Wiki is simple and quick to load and navigate, OneNote takes much longer to load up and is a far more complex application than is needed for my purpose.
    • trolleyed's avatar
      trolleyed
      Brass Contributor
      100% in agreement - a Wiki for me has been a really useful "this is what this Team is all about" page that loads really quickly. Replacing it with OneNote or a SharePoint page just doesn't fulfil that criteria
  • jmazur's avatar
    jmazur
    Copper Contributor

    Jan_Steberl I've been testing the pre-release for some time, but I discovered that  I'm missing a Wiki page in my channel (it is visible when I switch back to the stable version) and there is also no "plus" button to add another page. Do I need to configure something in pre-release to have the possibility to convert the Wiki page and have the "plus" button back?

    • ChrisDSy's avatar
      ChrisDSy
      Copper Contributor

      Hi
      I have converted a wiki to a Note in one of our Teams and the Note is only showing 4 of 16 sections of the original wiki page, 90% of the pages are missing.

       

      Ok I worked out what happened it does not add section just everything from the wiki as a page under general. 

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