Wiki/Knowledgebase/Information Sharing

[Chad West]

I'm just wondering how people are finding the best way to handle Teams integration along with SP365 and giving a collection of information to users. I'm with the IT helpdesk and would like to make various how-to articles for my users but am not sure which path of housing the info would be best received. I'm currently leaning towards a Notebook for the search functionality, but I'm not sure users would like the format change.

Please let me know what you have found to work for you.

[#2]

Hello @Chad West,

Good question and one that we are dealing with now. The classic SharePoint wiki solution lacks the modern experience and we are reluctant to use it. The Teams wiki solution works well for smaller teams but not suitable for our intranet users. We are leaning towards a custom wiki solution based on "out of the box" modern site pages and web parts.

I hope this helps.

Norm

[#3]

Just a reminder, here are some of the limitations to Teams Wiki.

#FredO365tips # 93:

CAUTION -
Key disadvantages of Wiki Tab in #MicrosoftTeams:
1) No native search capability in app
2) Data recovery when sections are deleted
3) Limited rich-text editing esp. when adding images

— Fred Yano (@fredyano) January 19, 2019

[#4]

You can use a Modern Site which serves as a Howto Wiki and publish all your articles as Modern Pages and use something like a highlighted content web part which can showcase your articles in the layout you prefer like cards or carousel on the homepage. 

Modern Pages have a powerful interface for creating articles than classic with building blocks like sections,spacer, body and header where you can easily drag and drop content between sections and fill in your colors for each section to stand out.

Everyone can follow the site and easily access the content from SharePoint Home or can be added as a tab to Microsoft Team.

[#5]

I second modern pages. You can promote them as news as well. Use metadata for filtering and search works as well on them. We also used OneNote for a KB however. So both methods can work.

[#6]

I agree with Naveen and Chris. Modern pages with highlighted content and news is the way we do it for our IT Support pages.

Rob
Los Gallardos

[#7]

We are using Modern Site, but the articles and news are a bit ugly and tedious to use since you have to load all of the articles individually and pull up a whole new page to load the articles content. Honestly what we wish could happen is posting a Notebook as an article so that we could load tons of information all organized into one spot and not have to make users load tons of new pages and then go back to get what they need. It seems that we are just going to have to do a hybrid of both "News Posts" and a Notebook at the same time.

[#8]

We're trying something new and more Teams-centric for training 'wikis'. We didn't like Teams wikis because they aren't searchable, we're not a big OneNote company so that was a bit complex, and we haven't rolled out SharePoint Online outside of teams usage, so we created a public team and just use the conversations in the channels as a 'wiki'. The channels serve as a high level topic table of contents.

Conversations are easily searchable, each topic is a separate conversation (make sure it has a title), the newest ones show up at the bottom, you can actually ask a question on a topic and have a reply right there. We know we'll have to moderate it to make sure topics don't disappear or other postings. We don't expect a lot of people but it was a fun project to just see how it would work.

[#9]

I like the concept, but immediately I could see our users abusing a system like that as a workaround for a helpdesk and would forgo the creation of tickets/emails.

[#10]

Good point. We might find abusers as well, but thought we'd try it out. I'd rather we could have read-only users of course but that doesn't exist in a team. I wanted to see if we could get users to help other users - our help desk doesn't usually get involved in training issues. And they don't work on anything else without a service desk ticket.

I'm an expert at using the wrong tool for solutions :) Anything more formal and we'd use SPO and site pages.

[#11]

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I'm an expert at using the wrong tool for solutions :)

LOL.