A great point made by Rich Finn
was that "Why would people add content here rather than their blogs?". I believe that other areas out there such as SharePointMagazine.net and EndUserSharePoint.com have proved that people are happy to. In these instances they tend to be multiple part post series or long articles.
For the purposes of this wiki I guess it is because SharePoint Development is an evolving approach and as tools come along and new code snippets appear it will change. I found myself in a dilemma of editing existing blog posts or adding new versioned ones (to ensure they came up at top of RSS feed). This way, the content is always there but you get peers reviewing your approach and giving the pros and cons. As an expert or a novice, this feedback helps understands the best ways to do things.
There is no problem with adding redundant content such as external links to blog posts, technet, msdn, social sites etc. But the idea of this wiki is to get the content on here and review and evolve it over time based on the whole communities opinions and perceptions.
It is a great way to help the community much like CodePlex and if you haven't got time to write a whole project in CodePlex this wiki is a great place to put it.
Comments (10)
Dec 03, 2008
Rich Finn says:
Makes it sound like I didn't think this was a good idea... Actually, I t...Makes it sound like I didn't think this was a good idea...
Actually, I think the SharePoint Dev Wiki is a GREAT idea. Like Jeremy says, it becomes difficult to maintain a personal technical blog - especially with a huge topic like SharePoint - because of frequency the content will change. Also, blogs tend to be a little self-serving, which can be fun in it's own way, but you'll find that assisting in a community effort such as this wiki may be even more rewarding. You will find people appending to your content in ways you didn't think about when it was originally written, and you could find that it makes you an even beter SharePointer than you already are.
Dec 04, 2008
Jeremy Thake says:
Yes I had a question via Twitter, I'll let him reply to this if we wants to clai...Yes I had a question via Twitter, I'll let him reply to this if we wants to claim it, asking why I just don't comment on MSDN pages instead. The reason I wouldn't do this is because again comments are chronological, rather than wiki pages that evolve over time. This is the same issue with Blogs too. Once people get the courage up to contribute directly to pages and submit content I can see this wiki going great guns!
Dec 04, 2008
Thomas Resing says:
I've been thinking the same thing, Jeremy. I use internal wikis for this kind of...I've been thinking the same thing, Jeremy. I use internal wikis for this kind of thing and then post to my blog after refining the ideas on the wiki. Confluence looks like a great engine, but I wonder if we couldn't be doing this kind of thing with the out of the box SharePoint wiki engine.
Dec 04, 2008
Jeremy Thake says:
Unfortunately the SharePoint wikis are only a v1.0 Microsoft attempt. I have wri...Unfortunately the SharePoint wikis are only a v1.0 Microsoft attempt. I have written a post
on this as have many others. The blog engine is no where near as powerful as some of the other platforms out there but I've stuck with that due to enhancements of CKS:EBE 2.0. With the wikis we need something that makes it easy to upload images inline in the editor as well as notifications on new content and the like. This is an Enterprise level wiki and have heard great things about it. I would have loved to use SharePoint Wiki but it just isn't up to this just yet.
Dec 07, 2008
Thomas Resing says:
Wikis in SharePoint don't act enough like MediaWiki and they should. However, th...Wikis in SharePoint don't act enough like MediaWiki and they should. However, they do work. Also, Confluence, while cool, behaves a lot differently than the market leader.
Of the three limitations in your post, one, discussions, is included in CKS:EWE.
Image upload should be in there and it's not. To be fair, however, I haven't seen any images embedded in articles here and there are very few in Wikipedia.
The third limitation is more of an annoyance.
I don't want to take away from what you've done here, but if a site named SharePointDevWiki isn't hosted in SharePoint, don't you think it would be a great goal of the project to get there? And sooner than later?
Dec 07, 2008
Jeremy Thake says:
I hear what you're saying, but CKS:EWE has been around for a long time and hasn'...I hear what you're saying, but CKS:EWE has been around for a long time and hasn't evolved for a while. I didn't want to put a dependency on this wiki growing due to a platform choice.
They'll be plenty of screenshots (images) in wiki pages, it'll be a little different to a wikipedia approach because of this.
There is a lot more functionality in Confluence than first meets the eye too which can be seen on their web site
.
Dec 09, 2008
Thomas Resing says:
Just read a great post explaining how Telerik's free rich text control now suppo...Just read a great post explaining how Telerik's free rich text control now supports image uploading inline in wikis: http://www.thesanitypoint.com/archive/2008/12/08/cross-browser-rich-text-editing-and-more-in-sharepoint.aspx
It's not too late to switch. You'll have at least one more contributor at launch if you do.
Dec 09, 2008
Jeremy Thake says:
Don't get me wrong, I am SharePoint crazy too, but as a consultant you have to c...Don't get me wrong, I am SharePoint crazy too, but as a consultant you have to chose the platform with the best fit for purpose (I'm not trying to teach any to suck eggs here either). It would be great to use WSS SharePoint Wikis to promote the platform, but it still has a long way to go to match the functionality of Confluence and other wikis. Have a look at this link on Confluences features
(WSS doesn't even have an entry on this comparison web site).
As many SharePoint experts have highlighted in the past, such as Andrew Connell, SharePoint is a Platform play and you gain benefits from it all sitting on the SharePoint Architecture. This site is in isolation and therefore gains no advantage, I could have simply extended my WSS blog site and had one. It would be like using SharePoint just for Records Management, it just isn't strong enough yet in that space. Have a read of my Leveraging the SharePoint Platform
articles for more on this.
This wiki is all about the content and collaboration between users. It'd be a shame to lose you as a contributor just because of the wiki platform. Microsoft don't use SharePoint as their WCM of choice yet and I don't feel any guilt in selecting Confluence as the Wiki platform. As one positive, at least it gives SharePoint people exposure to a potential wiki platform that can extend and integrate with SharePoint and also highlight what is missing from WSS wikis...and by the way, it's not just image uploading.
Can we lay this one to rest now? Thanks for your support and I hope to see you contributing more to this space...or possibly over at CKS:EWE!
Dec 15, 2008
Jeremy Thake says:
The guys at Atlassian have also put this page up on Confluence vs. SharePoint wh...The guys at Atlassian have also put this page up on Confluence vs. SharePoint
which I thought you may find interesting.
Dec 15, 2008
Thomas Resing says:
To Atlassian, like others, SharePoint is merely "a document repository." Conflu...To Atlassian, like others, SharePoint is merely "a document repository."
Confluence "takes you away from the sharing libraries of Word documents and towards collaborating."
Why use SharePoint then?