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

[Jan_Steberl]

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 - Export a wiki to a OneNote notebook - Microsoft Support

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 Public preview in Microsoft Teams - Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Docs.  
2. Users then choose to join the public preview individually. See Get early access to new Teams features - Office Support (microsoft.com) 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

[#2]

@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?

[#3]

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. 

[#4]

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.

[#5]

I had something similar happen. A lot of content just did not transfer like images and notes is so darn slow to update. This halfway killed a working and simple solution for our sales team to access product information on the go. Notes takes so long to load. I think I may need to find a different app that doesn't run this slow.

[#6]

@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

[#7]

@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.

[#8]

It's clear from the reasoning that they did no UX research. How embarrassing, but on brand.

[#9]

@Jan_Steberl What will happen to Teams Meeting Notes that are also wikis? 

[#10]

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

[#11]

I've just tried this out
I dont like it
Improve OneNote first

[#12]

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?

[#13]

Is this tool to move Wiki pages to OneNote still in active development? It appears the parsing script fails to recognize Wiki formatting and the best option is to manually rebuild each page individually. Where can we find updates on this parsing tool? I'm going to wait until MS fixes the bug before I lose two weeks of work due to MS's complete incompetence and negligence here. What a productivity tool!

[#14]

I've submitted the following feedback: 

Re: Retiring Wiki in place of Notes. 

This is horrendous and nonsensical. The wiki is agile, to the point, and freakin awesome. Notes is an absolute clusterfck and serves an entirely different function than a wiki. If I've wanted to use Notes, I would have been using that - in some cases, I do.  

Regardless of how I feel about it, I've just exported a Team Wiki to Notes and all the pages say Untitled Page without the ability to edit the name of the page. So, that was pointless.  

That's going to be a FOR THE LOVE OF THE FEW THINGS MICROSOFT HAS GOTTEN RIGHT... HELL NO from me on this topic.

[#15]

It’s terrible that after you removed Wiki from SharePoint, you are now removing it from Teams. Without replacement. In M365, there is no way to store structured content such as knowledge base or wiki pages. OneNote is great for notes, Modern SharePoint pages are great as a welcome page, but both are unusable as a wiki or knowledge base library. The only option is to switch to competitors such as Confluence.

[#16]

@Jan_Steberl 
This is a horrible idea. It would make way more sense to transition Teams Wikis to Microsoft's new Loop tool (which is like Notion).

OneNote is not analogous to Wikis in use; unlike OneNote, Wikis are not used to collect notes in real-time, Wikis are used to organize existing, structured information and make it discoverable. While the Teams Wiki has always been a bad implementation, at least it is structured.

[#17]

@Jan_Steberl   the wiki feature as been very positive as it is a simple and powerful way to let users access data in a structured way.  I am sure the change would  'improve note taking experience over Wiki', however we didn't select a wiki to try to take better notes.  I echo the comments that removing the wiki impacts what our team has built out over the last year with no understandable upside.  I hope you will reconsider keeping the WIKI functionality.

[#18]

I have to agree with most people here that OneNote is in no way a replacement for Wiki. Please keep Wiki alive.

[#19]

Converting to a Loop workspace would be much better the OneNote.

[#20]

You wrote that users could "try out the experience" by exporting Wiki to Notes. So I did that, but now the Wiki is read only and refers to Notes, which I don't want to use because it doesn't provide the list of tasks in the left pane where a use can navigate tasks. How do I unlock Wiki so I can continue to use until we decide what we're using next? Or How do I get a list of tasks in Notes?