SPC: Customizing Enterprise Wikis in SharePoint 2010 with Gail Jacoby & Ted Pattison
Published 10/21 courtesy of Bamboo Solutions Community
Opting for back-to-back sessions on customization this morning, I followed Heather Solomon's excellent session on customizing and branding My Sites with an equally informative session on customizing enterprise wikis presented by Gail Jacoby and Ted Pattison. In his informal introductory remarks, Ted asked "how many fans of SharePoint Designer (SPD) do we have here?" With a reasonably satisfactory response from the crowd, Ted went on to state as a goal for the session to have "you leave here today thinking you don't even need Visual Studio."
Gail then began the session by noting the simple and accessible content creation that enterprise wikis provide in 2010, pointing out that the publishing infrastructure allows users to "dial up" the features they desire. Gail went on to explain in more detail that since the enterprise wiki site template is built on the SharePoint publishing infrastructure (and is powered by the SharePoint platform, naturally) that you can accordingly leverage the platform to bring in whatever is appropriate for your site? Need LOB data in your wiki? No problem. Also, such features as categories, ratings, and note board conversations can now be surfaced on any page and applied consistently across every page in a wiki.
Gail demonstrated that through the Ribbon, markup styling is available to consistently apply styles across a wiki site. Also with thanks to the Ribbon, it is now "very easy for end users to insert [rich media content] using the rich text editor." Gail also demonstrated that it's easy to change the template of a page from the Page Layout button in the Ribbon, "to add structure and formatting to the wiki," and how social metadata is exposed through the Tags & Notes button on the wiki page itself.
Having completed the out-of-the-box demo, Gail handed the reins over to Ted to cover the customization side of things. Picking up on one of Gail's main points, Ted began by reinforcing that "the enterprise wiki is a publishing site [and] can be branded exactly the same way we branded publishing sites in 2007." Ted also explained that the output caching feature allows you "to scale to thousands -tens of thousands- of users."
Ted began his demo by creating a new Site Collection. Having done so, he then showed that editing the home page of a wiki within the new site will surface the managed metadata throughout the wiki site. Ted demonstrated working with the enterprise wiki content type, "which is a new page layout [that] provides extra column values beyond what you get in a regular publishing site." Ted explained that you also get additional page layouts beyond those in a "regular" publishing site.
Briefly touching on a couple of "developer opportunities" in 2010 enterprise wiki sites, Ted referenced both the create branding feature, and the ability to add a new wiki page type. Ted went on to demonstrate applying a new custom master page via the Site Settings. Opening a page layout in SPD, Ted pointed out the new field control for taxonomies. Ted demonstrated that content types can be created either through SPD or directly within the browser, and demonstrated the browser-based approach.
After showing how to use SPD's graphical interface to design new wiki pages, and showing how to write into wiki categories via the Term Management Store, by session's end, Ted had a completely customized (and barely recognizable) version of the out-of-the-box enterprise wiki site that Gail had started with.
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