In organizations, a wiki provides a low-maintenance way to record knowledge. Information that is usually stored in email, discussed around the water cooler, or written on paper can be recorded as knowledge in a wiki, together with similar knowledge. Other example uses of wikis include creating an instruction guide, gathering data from the field, tracking help desk or call center knowledge, brainstorming ideas, and building an encyclopedia of knowledge. For example, wikis are a great way to collate, document, and agree on the practices or ways of working, as well as a way to record work-specific terminology, such as accounting or legal terms. It is a knowledge repository.

If the knowledge is specific to a particular team or project, then a wiki should be created within a site that is used by that team or project. If the knowledge domain will be useful to a number of teams, then you need to create the wiki in a site that all teams can access. Such wikis would store their wiki pages in a wiki library; however, when the knowledge domain is of use for all users in an organization, and the business requires that the content be approved before all users can see it, you should consider using an Enterprise Wiki site.

By default, all Team sites contain a wiki library where you can store all of your wiki pages, which contain team information, as well as the content that refers to a specific knowledge domain; however, it is best to separate the different types of knowledge into their own wiki page libraries. You can then apply different permission settings on the two wiki libraries; that is, those who create the team pages may not be the users, who should be granted access to contribute, edit, or update the content in a wiki for a specific knowledge domain.

Unlike other libraries, when you click the name of a wiki library, you will be taken to the home page. With other libraries, you are directed to the default view of the library. On the home page of your wiki library, you should specify the purpose of the wiki and any assumptions that apply to the wiki.

For example, if the wiki is to be used for brainstorming, the home page should contain an overview of the brainstorming challenge; you can then provide a list of your thoughts and ideas, which can become links to pages where you and the rest of the team elaborate on them. Other team members can add to your list of thoughts and ideas, which may, in turn, stimulate other brilliant ideas. You may need to monitor the content that others add—not to remove ideas, because in a brainstorming activity, there are no wrong ideas or thoughts; however, if someone has written a judgmental comment, you may need to remove it. Also, as the list of ideas and thoughts grow, you should look for duplicate ideas that you can amalgamate or group together, or for ideas that are not practicable. As the brainstorming wiki progresses, some structure to the content appears. You can first identify the major contender ideas, with supporting comments that other wiki contributors can add to, and then make a decision before sharing the final recommendation to the interested users who were not part of the brainstorming exercise.

Therefore, a wiki helps you collect, organize, and share information. Wikis often become the repositories for your unstated knowledge, which otherwise might not be stored anywhere. Wikis can encourage informal learning and sharing tips with other users, which can reduce the need for formal training or continuous IT support.

You might also consider including on the wiki home page a reminder to users to check out wiki pages before editing them. If checkout is not used, information can be lost when more than one person edits a wiki page at the same time; the first person’s edits are overwritten when the second user saves the page. You might also have information on how you want contributors to work with your wiki page, which you can include on the home page; for example, when you have recently released a new wiki, you might suggest that contributors limit the time they edit a single page to 10–15 minutes, so that other contributors can add their knowledge.

In this exercise, you will create a wiki page library.

If your wiki page library contains many pages, you might want to group pages into categories, and then display those categories on the home page of the wiki library so that visitors to your wiki can easily find information on a specific category. By default, the wiki page library does not provide a method to categorize your pages; however, by adding one or more columns to the wiki page library, and then using a list app on your home page, you can provide an easy category solution for visitors to your wiki.

Before creating a category column in your wiki page library, you need to decide which column type you need to use. You could use a choice column if the categories you wish to use are not specified elsewhere. If the categories are created as items in another list, or as terms in a Term Store, then you could use a Lookup or Managed Metadata column type. When the category choices are used in many lists or libraries, the category column may already be created in your site or site collection as a site column.

In the following exercise, you will create a category column, categorize a page, and then add a list app to the home page to display the pages grouped by category.

An Enterprise Wiki is similar to a wiki based on a wiki page library in that it is a knowledge repository; however, it is a publishing site that should be used for sharing and updating large volumes of information across an enterprise. If your organization needs a large, centralized knowledge repository that is designed to both store and share information on an enterprise scale with many authors, consider using an Enterprise Wiki.

Enterprise Wikis can be created as a top level site of a site collection or as a subsite using the Enterprise Wiki site template, which is built on the Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013 publishing infrastructure. This infrastructure provides various ways to control content; for example, you can assign permissions or use a workflow to establish an approval process.

If you believe that the pages of an Enterprise Wiki site will be frequently referenced by a large number of users, and that your wiki will become a valuable business-critical asset to your company, you should consider creating the Enterprise Wiki site as the top level of a site collection. Depending on the implementation of SharePoint in your organization, you may not be able to do this; you may need to contact your IT department. Even if you can create a site collection, you should still contact your IT department because they may wish to implement other infrastructure configurations, such as storing the site collection in a single, dedicated Microsoft SQL Server database so that they correctly prioritize the recovery of the wiki, should a hardware failure occur, or in a disaster recovery scenario.

In the following exercise, you will create an Enterprise Wiki subsite.

When an Enterprise Wiki site is first created, the home page of the site describes what an Enterprise Wiki site is and why you might want to use one. The Enterprise Wiki site provides additional capabilities that you do not see when you are using a wiki page library to store your wiki pages, such as assigning a category or rating to the page. Also, wiki pages on an Enterprise Wiki site are stored in a document library named Pages.

A wiki page on an Enterprise Wiki site behaves similarly to a wiki page in a wiki page library:

However, there are some differences:

Because a page on the Enterprise Wiki site is a publishing page, you can complete the following tasks:

The Pages library on the Enterprise Wiki site is less restrictive than other publishing pages that you may be used to. Scheduling and the Publishing Approval workflow are not enabled in the library.

Pages in an Enterprise Wiki site can be categorized to help readers browse or find related pages. A category can be a word or a phrase. When you first create an Enterprise Wiki site, the category box appears to the left of the wiki content, but it is dimmed and does not allow you to categorize the page. The categorization of Enterprise Wiki pages relies on the Managed Metadata Service (MMS) and Term Store, which allow you to centrally define categories, and then reuse them throughout the organization in multiple site collections.

Categories, also known as terms, are collected together as term sets. Term sets are put into groups, which can be managed by one or more designated users. Term sets can be created in the Term Store by the designated users using the browser, or imported from a .csv file. A designated user can go to the Term Store from the Site Settings page by clicking Term Store Management, under Site Administration. Before you can categorize pages, you must select a term set for the Pages library column: Wiki Categories.

In the following exercise, you will select a term set for the Wiki Category column, and then categorize a wiki page.

A web log, known as a blog, is a personal journal or commentary shared on a website. Blogging refers to publishing thoughts, in formal essays or more informal formats, on a blog website. A person who does this is called a blogger. The thoughts shared on the blog website are called posts or articles. Each post or article is displayed in reverse chronological order, with the most recent additions featured most prominently, and older items grouped in archives organized by the month in which they were created.

Blog posts can be categorized to help users find past conversations. Also, blogs are indexed so that a visitor can search through old blogs and learn from past conversations. Bloggers write blogs frequently, often on a daily basis. Some bloggers allow visitors to comment on the blog to provide feedback and to ask questions.

A blog can also be used by a group of people, such as a team or an organization. The Microsoft SharePoint and the Microsoft Office team blogs, for example, are found at blogs.office.com and blogs.office.com/b/sharepoint, respectively.

Instead of sending out email or newsletters to the team or organization, you should consider using a blog as a platform where information and opinions can be traded among team members or employees. An organization blog that is published on the Internet is a powerful marketing tool and can influence purchasing decisions by showing visitors to the blog that the organization is an expert in its field.

If you are going to create a team or business blog, then you should spend time thinking of what you want to achieve and the areas of expertise you want to share. You should carefully choose who should join you in posting blogs, ensuring that they commit to blogging, let’s say, at least once a month. Choose authors who are smart and passionate about the topics you wish the blog to cover. Also, at least one of you must manage the blog.

In this exercise, you will create a blog site, and then establish categories for your blog posts.

The home page of a Blog site consists of three areas:

In this exercise, you will create categories for your blog posts and remove the categories and blog post that were created when the blog site was created.

A blog post is the method by which you share your opinions and knowledge. You must remember that, as a blogger, you are responsible for the commentary that you post and you can be held personally liable if your posting is considered defamatory, obscene, proprietary, or libelous. Similar to posting information on a wiki, you should practice good manners and understatement.

You can create a blog post by using many tools, including Word 2007, Word 2010, and Word 2013; OneNote 2007, OneNote 2010, and OneNote 2013; Microsoft Live Writer; and the browser. On the blog website, under Blog Tools, there is a link that allows you to start a blogging app, such as Word, to quickly create a blog post. The New SharePoint Blog Account dialog box appears. The web address of the blog site is listed in the Blog URL text box.

A Word dialog box then opens, warning that when Word sends information to the blog service provider, it may be possible for other people to see that information, including your user name and password. If you choose to continue, another Word dialog box opens, stating that the account registration was successful.

Once a blog post is opened in Word, the Blog Post tab is active. The Blog group provides easy access to the home page of your blog site, so that you can insert a category to the blog post, open an existing blog, manage accounts, and publish the blog. Any pictures that you insert into the post using Word are automatically copied to the Photos picture library when the blog post is either published or published as a draft.

In the following exercise, you will create and modify a blog post by using the browser.

To interact with a blogger, you can leave comments on a blog post. As a blogger, you must review the comments on your posts, not only to respond to comments but also to delete comments that are either off-topic or are used to advertise websites or broadcast spam. If the aim of a blog post is to start a discussion but you receive virtually no responses, you could use a comment to post a question to your own blog post.

In this exercise, you will add a blog and delete a comment on a blog post.