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]

This is insanity. What makes this even worse is that, how bad the export to notes script may be, IT ISN'T EVEN AVAILABLE FOR PRIVATE WIKI CHANNELS.

So screw you, teams with private wiki pages, here's hours if not days of painstaking manual copypaste labor to move, reformat and reorder content from a tried-and-true Wiki format to a slow, unwieldy, almost unsearchable, non-automatable nonsensical tool like Notes. Should have had those channels public all along because we can't be bothered to make it so that you can convert between public and private, but welp, can't help you now, buhbye!

This can't be real. It just can't be real.

[#3]

Bouke, MS doesn't design products. The shoot from the hip and then react from product feedback. It's the most offensive and convoluted way to design a product and once you understand this lack of design IS their design methodology, this it makes a lot of sense why their tools are so clunky, difficult and frustrating.

[#4]

Instead of replacing Wiki with OneNote "Notes", it would be a better idea, and make much more sense, to replace Wiki with a modern Loop Workspace.

[#5]

After trying to convert a wiki to a OneNote I highly recommend not even trying that route. OneNote is too slow and doesn't update in teams fast enough to act as a wiki. I highly suggest just moving your wiki to a SharePoint page. At least with that in teams, it loads and updates more quickly.

[#6]

Retiring Wiki is a foolish decision. My department uses Wiki pages as an actual Wiki, to detail procedures for employees to reference easily. Its helpful that its easy to edit as well, and the layout is simple and matches the look of teams. The alternatives you are proposing are too tedious and complicated for what we need. They take forever to load, show irrelevant content from other channels (because Sharepoint and OneNote put all the items from a team in one place), and look awful within the Teams client, especially if you use dark mode.

[#7]

Any chance the Private channels will have the same migration experience Wiki to Notes than the rest @Jan_Steberl or shall we instruct the owners of the private channels to manually copy & paste their notes? 

[#8]

There's no design reasoning behind this. Here's a petition, please share and sign: https://chng.it/f8VzSCjnp5

[#9]

@Jan_Steberl - Do we know if for the new notes feature, if that notebook is auto created with the new channel creation, or will it only create notebook upon first access? Some Channels may never need to use that OneNote notes section, and I could see users getting confused when they start to see TONS of new notebooks in their OneNote app. :thinking_face:

[#10]

Microsoft please note there is not a single positive comment here. I have a team with 20 channels and each channel is using a single wiki page with up to 100 sections. Since sections all get mashed together into the single page (essentially ignored) this will all have to be done manually. That is 2000 copy pastes. And that is only the team that I know about. Once in OneNote the pages don't auto number like they did in wiki and I have to agree that OneNote is much slower. Please consider keeping or better rebuilding the wiki functionality. It would be great if wiki allowed for searching, version control and had a few more wiki functions. Moving to OneNote has me strongly considering other products for a wiki. Once I move the wiki to another product the whole, we need to use teams argument comes into play. This will push more users to other products including other platforms like slack with a separate integrated wiki.

[#11]

I have a solution to keep your team's content organized. You need to first rename each channel, then duplicate each channel manually then delete the old channels, this allow you the opportunity to add the tabs one at a time in the correct order since it's impossible to edit the order of these. By rebuilding all aspects of your team and deleting the old channels only then can you retain the organization of your team. YOU MUST CHOOSE IF ORGANIZATION - or - EXISTING COMMENTS are more important... MS simply does not allow you to retain the organization of the tabs and port the content from Wiki to OneNote with your current team. Obviously they did not design this or consider the ramifications of this dumb decision.

[#12]

@Anthony-123, I had the same issue and noticed a "auto refresh" quick fix. If you click in the title of the page (title above the date) enter a space or delete a space it refreshes with the imported name of the page. Lots of work, but it was helpful in one of my smaller notebooks. Good Luck. 

[#13]

Not having WIki and being forced to use OneNote is actually a huge problem. OneNote is not a fully functional platform. Period. It's more often than not very slow and it fails to sync. OneNote is not a professional tool that can be relied upon for recording critical data. At all.   

I need to exit this public preview in order to operate our business. Crossing my fingers that disabling the EA policy resolves the issue. 

[#14]

@Jan_Steberl    the loss of the wiki app/feature will be a huge loss as using One Note to replace this functionality is not efficient for those quick notes, user cheats, rolodex is not easy to have pinned to Teams like Wiki is.   Utilizing One Note will make this very cumbersome as an end user and take five times the amount of time to access the same information that is easily accessible in a Wiki today.    I ask that you do not remove the Wiki functionality.

[#15]

I have successfully made arguments to multiple groups inside my 60,000 person company expressing how MS's flippant anti-design decisions like this severely affect us and break our workflows. I'm very hopeful for ending this relationship with MS so we can use tools designed for our use cases.

[#16]

I guess Microsoft doesn't understand Wikis. Why not just replace Wiki with Word documents? Do you actually believe this garbage or did they make you say it is an improvement? Sure the Wiki was terrible but at least it was simple. The wiki should be moving in the direction of a group Logseq or Roam but instead we get a word processor with lots of side chats. I don't need a place to store "notes" I need somewhere to store institutional knowledge.

[#17]

I really hope you guys listen to your users and please DO NOT GET RID OR THE WIKI!
This is a terrible idea!

[#18]

@Jan_Steberl 

Hi Jan,

This is a hurtful change for my teams.  We use wiki to display formatted static information, we use them like user manuals. We don't update these process documents often.

We use notes as a flexible tool to capture meeting information and information.  Now that we have to use notes for both, we have a system revision on our hands to keep things organized. 

I wish MS Teams Channels still supported wiki.  

Losing features like this makes fully embracing Microsoft Teams difficult, as we must revise established business processes at the whims of a general software provider.  

How do you consider this negative impact to the user experience when deciding to reduce feature support? 

[#19]

@Jan_Steberl Whereas, we used to have a great tabbed list of over 50 entries now we have to scroll around in Notes to find what we are looking for.  Terrible.

[#20]

Does anyone have an alternative for Wiki? Notes is wholly unusable as an alternative and our workflow and collaboration is suffering due to this irreversible "preview".

[#21]

@Anthony-123 I moved our wiki to a SharePoint site, it was the only thing that worked fast enough, the OneNote was a massive fail and wouldn't update in teams correctly.