A Wiki for Team Services and TFS
One of the big areas of investment for us recently is “social” experiences. I’m using a fairly broad definition of that term, including a focus on “me” and my stuff and capabilities that improve collaboration across my team, project, organization. You’ve already seen lots of pieces that support this general direction:
- The new account pages with “me” views of work, favorites, pull requests, etc.
- A new project landing page optimized for exploring projects across your organization.
- To some degree, the new navigation experience that cleans things up and gives us some room to continue to grow new experiences.
- Follow and favorites experiences and significantly improved notifications.
- The beginnings of mobile experiences so you get a great experience regardless of the device you are on.
- Continued investment in pull requests, policies, etc.
- Code and work item search capabilities to make it easy to find what I’m looking for.
All of these are steps on a journey to an improved collaboration experience. As part of our work, we concluded we need to have a pretty full-featured Wiki experience to enable all the collaboration experiences we feel are needed. Fortunately, one of our partners was already building a Wiki extension and had published it in the VS Marketplace. We decided to purchase the extension and use it as a stepping stone to get to where we want to be with Wikis. We’re just getting going on it now and it will probably take a couple of sprints for us to get our feet under us and start producing a preview of the “V2” of that extension. For now, you can use the current extension in the marketplace. It’s not complete but it’s reasonably functional. We’ve changed the publisher to Microsoft DevLabs for now to represent the transitional state. As we build it out, we’ll make sure it works both on Team Services and Team Foundation Server. I hate to comment on the business model at this early of a stage but we think we’ll just include it as part of your base TFS/Team Services license – so we don’t expect there will be any additional charge. In fact, I think it won’t even be in the marketplace when we are done – it will just be built it. Some of these things we need to settle for sure but, at a high level, we think of Wiki as a fundamental part of the experience and don’t want to have it not be available for some people. Stay tuned for more in the next few months. Also, watch for a feature timeline update early next month to see more of the “social” work on our roadmap. You can read more if you are interested on our official Wiki announcement blog post. Brian
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