Sure, you can use the SharePoint wiki as-is. It’s fine. It “works”. But I like to take it a step or two further. Here are some “extras” that I implement on most wikis that I create these days.

The first step: Automating a link back to “Home”
Technically, the first step is to empty out the contents of the “Home” page, delete the “How to Use This Wiki Library” page, THEN… automate the link back.

Go to the Library Settings and add a new Hyperlink field. I usually name this “Back To:” (or rather, to be extra diligent, I first name it “BackTo”, then go back and rename it to a nice name with spaces and symbols).

Next, open the site in SharePoint Designer (SPD) and create a new workflow for this wiki library. Set it to run on new item creation, and title it something like “Wiki Home Link”. Build a dynamic string with the contents:
https://sharepoint/path/to/wiki/Home.aspx, My-Wiki-Name-Home

Make sure that there’s a space after the comma!

For the final workflow step, update the current item’s “Back To:” field using the data in the string.

First step done*! Now any new page will automatically have a nice hyperlink back to the wiki’s home page. No need to remember to type [[Home]].

Next step: Create more metadata
If this is going to be more than a few pages, I like to create additional metadata. Categories, tags, etc., to help group, filter or sort.

Go to the wiki Library’s settings again. Add as many new columns as you prefer. I like:

• Category: A predefined dropdown list. Required, 1 selection. For a “SharePoint HowTo Wiki” I would use options like “General HowTo”, “Extending SharePoint”, “Informational”, “Quick Tip”, etc.
• Audience: Sometimes. Setup similarly to Category, but allow multiple selections. I use this when I have a lot of articles for different role types. Why would someone who’s only submitting content care to read an article about how to administer it? I would have options such as “Everyone”, “Project Owners”, “Power Users”, etc. Keep in mind that some pages are applicable to multiple user types.
• Skill Level: Could be redundant with “Audience” – depending on what your content is and how you’re intending to use the wiki. I like to use “(1) Beginner”, “(2) Intermediate”, “(3) Advanced”.
• Tags: A predefined dropdown menu, or lookup list (as you prefer) allowing multiple selections. This is helpful to be able to find all the wiki articles that are related to “Productivity” or “Permissions & Security” without having to fully read or understand the article title.

Step 2.5(ish):
Now that you have your metadata fields prepped, create some views to put them to use. I group all items (expanded) by Category for my default view. Then I have a similar view grouped by “Skill Level”. I also create views for “Recently Updated” (where “Modified” <= [Today-5]) and "New" items.

Step 3.14…?
Now that you have the new fields created, new views to make use of the fields, let’s put it all to better use.

Go to the Home.aspx page and edit the page – using the Site Actions tab – not using the wiki rich text editor. Add the wiki Library’s web part to the available web part zone at the bottom of the wiki content. Title it “Table of Contents” and select the appropriate view to be displayed (I usually display the “grouped by category” view and remove the Modified/Modified By fields).

Upgrade Your TOC
Let’s make the Table of Contents even better!

Check out the Path to SharePoint blog’s Easy Tabs. This is where the additional views come in handy. Create a tab for each view to let the users decide how they would like to browse through the articles.

Finally, clean it up.
The down side to the SharePoint wiki pages is that you can’t customize the display of the fields on the page as you can with a SharePoint List item. Sure, you can rearrange them in the Library settings, but the wiki content will always remain at the top.

At this point I would open the Home.aspx page in SPD and remove the additional fields (*including the “Back To:” hyperlink field). It’ll customize that page, which I really don’t like to do unless really necessary. However, it’s just the one page in the Library.

In Summary
At this point, you should be good to go.

• You have automated your “Home” link so your users can always quickly get back to the home page.
• You should have a short “welcome” page with a nice, clean table of contents. No need to manually maintain the listing because the links to the pages are there as soon as you create the new page.
• You’re providing the users with the ability to quickly find the content that’s relevant to them.
• And you can still utilize the wiki functionality to quickly create/update articles, and provide links within the content as you always could.

Enjoy!

If you use the trick http://www.sharepointology.com/setup/add-web-parts-to-dispform-editform-or-newformaspx/ to add web parts so that you don’t unghost the page… ListViews added will not display the title, or a border. They’re “stuck” with a default. If you convert it to a DVWP, everything’s snazzy.

If you want to use a query string filter, this also will not work. You will need a DVWP to do this.
TIP!
Add a LVWP to the page using the trick above, then open in SPD and Convert to DVWP. Then setup a query string parameter to filter the DVWP on. As long as you don’t start monkeying with the code, making these changes in SPD doesn’t seem to unghost the page.

Maybe someday we’ll actually finish it. *crosses fingers*

Once that’s all done, we’re going to finish scrubbing the house down – it’s collected a TON of dust and dirt and clutter from the nearly-6-month-long renovation project. And then – BAKING! My favorite part.

Once we make it through the weekend, I want to focus on finishing up that front portion of the first floor. Why? Because that’s where my drawing desk (I call that section, “my studio”) is located, and I’m just itching to be able to put it to use! Do I smell a New Year’s resolution?

We’ll see.

Anyway. I’m going to go through the probably-hundreds of photos that I’ve collected from the renovation so far and post some before-during-after photos on the house blog. Keep an eye open for those! What a difference… It’s a whole new house!

I visited the Apple store one weekend for other reasons, and asked them about their iMac stock, you know, since I was already there. They don’t carry the upgraded model that I wanted (no surprise) so I’d have to order it online and wait. And that’s when the fun began…

When we returned home from the Apple store that day, it’s like the Mac Pro just knew. It seemed to retaliate and refused to boot up. Nothing I tried seemed to work – just the normal startup tone and a gray screen. Eventually, after I sucked it up and ordered the iMac, I realized that it was a system drive failure.

The iMac finally arrived and I was all giddy setting up my new toy. The screen is ridiculous. I just wish it was under better circumstances – I wanted to migrate my data over to it more gracefully, and at my own leisure…

I’ve learned a number of things during the setup of my iMac. First, I already knew that my most recent data backup was not really up to date (my bad), but at least I had something. Secondly, the Library folder is hidden in OS X Lion – so it takes just a little extra effort to migrate my data over to the new machine. And third, the folder structures in Lion have changed – significantly. I can no longer do a simple folder copy from one machine to another in order to “migrate” my data. It just won’t work.

I tried the migration assistant, which worked. Kind of. Since the iMac was already setup with a user account it needed to migrate the data over to a new user account. After that, I tested copying the Mail & Calendar folders over to the original user account now that they’ve been converted to the new folder structure – but that presented with a handful of permissions issues that I need to work through. The Calendar seemed to be mostly OK after that, but Mail just wasn’t quite right and, frustrated, I left it there.

I was actually able to get the old system drive working long enough to grab my Library & a few other folders off of it – so the data backup issue is no longer an issue. Now I just need to get everything Lion-ified.

So here’s my current plan of action (because I know that everyone’s just dying to know):

1. I scavenged another drive and rebuilt the Mac Pro with 10.6 & installed all of the updates.
2. I’ve started “restoring” my Mail, Calendar, and Address Book data back to the Mac Pro in 10.6 format.
3. Once that’s confirmed OK, I need to install my older version of iPhoto, make sure the photo library is OK, then link my iTunes library to the proper location and make sure that’s OK.
4. Then, I need to install the new version of iPhoto so that it’ll update the iPhoto library database. Apparently I decided at the wrong time to upgrade iPhoto – JUST prior to the failure. It didn’t actually install due to App Store connection issues…

That will be the end of the preparation phase. After that, I can go one of two routes:

1. Upgrade the Mac Pro to Lion and migrate the data over from there.
2. Reinstall Lion on the iMac and use the Migration Assistant to hopefully grab my data and migrate it over for me from the Mac Pro.

I’m going to reinstall Lion on the iMac anyway, because at this point I’ve tinkered so much that I don’t trust it’s stability. It’s already started throwing kernel panics.

This effort better be worth it! From what I’ve seen of the iMac and Lion so far, I think I’ll ultimately be pretty happy. If I can ever finish getting it setup.