Wiki has gone to public preview and you can check it out today!

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/devops/33855/

We’re firm believers that a vibrant extension ecosystem is critical to having a best-in-class DevOps product. Not only does it organically bring new technologies and solutions that our customers are looking for, it also builds a community around our product which is a huge contributor to the success of any platform.

A recently example of that partnership and success is the Wiki extension which has done well in the Marketplace. We have been exploring different ways to bring more ‘social’ experiences to Team Services and it became clear that a Wiki , which has been on the team’s backlog for quite some time, is going to be necessary to fully realize that vision.

Today, we’re excited to announce that we have acquired the Marketplace extension, ‘Wiki’, from Agile Extensions.

This decision is driven by a long-term plan to offer a built-in Wiki experience for Team Services instead of requiring people to install an extension from the Marketplace. To achieve this we will leverage the existing extension as a starting point, and deprecate the Marketplace listing once we’re ready to release our built-in solution. Acquiring the extension is our first step and I’m including some additional thoughts below. If I’ve left anything out, or if you have any unanswered questions, don’t hesitate to leave a comment here or tweet me @JoeB_in_NC

I am a ‘Wiki’ customer, how does this impact me?

In the short term, this acquisition will not impact you and there is no action required. The extension will show up as being published by a different publisher, ‘Microsoft DevLabs’ instead of ‘Agile Extensions’, but you’ll be able to continue using it without disruption. Long-term, we will deprecate the Marketplace listing and give customers an option to migrate their Wiki content to the built-in experience.

Why not build your own and keep other Wiki experiences in the Marketplace?

Our publishers are an extended member of our team, their success is our success and vice versa. In the case of Wiki, our team had been working closely with Agile Extensions on their experience. During that process is when our team realized we needed a built-in solution. Agile Extensions had made such a good start with their extension that it made the most sense to purchase what they had already created especially after having worked so closely with them.

Do you have more information to share about your built-in Wiki plans?

We don’t have a specific timeline to share with you but the team is busy preparing designs and determining the direction we want to go with Wiki. One of the biggest inputs to that process is the set of feedback that the current Wiki extension has received. We’ve collected all of that and Agile Extensions has been very supportive in ensuring this information is not lost. Some of the top of mind items we’ve heard from Wiki users that we’ll consider are:

1. Welcome page: there is an inherent desire to have a customized home page that teams can author
2. Navigation: As Wikis grow, finding the right page becomes a pain so we’ll need to land this properly
3. Browsing: Ordering a specific page is desirable but easier, and authoring an ordered list of pages is painful and very valuable
4. Authors: Pages are authored not only by developers but also by content writers and project managers there having a simple authoring mechanism is key

These are items we know come from the feedback, but we’re always listening. Please, if you have additional thoughts about Wiki and what you want to see in Team Services then leave a comment!