WikiSharePoint!

Came into the office this weekend (yeah, I need a life) and found a blog posting from last Thursday by Mart Muller. He's put together a set of Web Parts that provide a Wikipedia like experience but hosted on your SharePoint site.

First there's the Search Results Web Part. This displays any hits on the term you search for using the Wiki Search Web Part. It has links to the content of the search results and will also automatically hyperlink phrases that match other Wiki entries. There's also a Tree View of the Wiki entries so you can navigate through preferred and variant terms. The whole thing is hosted in one custom list (a thesaurus) with logic behind it to parse out the terms and serve up the information all linked together with like terms. Adding an entry is easy and just like filling out any other SharePoint list.

I installed this quickly and easily in our dev environment to give it a whirl. A couple of minutes later I created a site to host the web parts (you can also create an area on a portal and it works the same) and added a few terms. Simple to implement and workable. Even though Mart says this is beta, it seems to be pretty solid and usable and can only get better. Combine this with Jim Duncan's cBlog Templates and you've got yourself a pretty powerful set of services all hosted using SharePoint.

There's been requests before about creating KBs or other type tools with SharePoint and we've all told people it's doable but just needs a little work to bring things together. I can see this as a great start at a knowledge base in your organization. Just create an area on your Portal called Knowledge Base, drop the Web Parts on, and let everyone start adding terms. The great thing is that there are lots of ways to cross link the information and terms once they're entered will automatically hyperlink to other terms in their bodies so it saves you having to manually creating links. So check out the Web Parts here and let Mart know what you think.