Wiki base content has an important role to play as part of an organization's information architecture. Too often business critical reference material is locked away in weighty tomes of policy and procedure documents where it is difficult to find and therefore rarely accessed.

Wikis have been an integral part of the SharePoint platform since the 2010 release of the product. However, the authoring experience (even in SharePoint 2013) has been somewhat below par. Most users simply prefer to author content in Microsoft Word as they are familiar with their favorite word processor and have built up a natural immunity to its faults and idiosyncrasies.

Asking users to switch authoring tools and use a sub-optimal browser based text editor that too often demands a detailed knowledge of HTML is a hard sell. It is made more difficult when wiki pages must contain embedded content (graphics, images, clip art etc.) because the nature of a wiki article (as with any standard web page) is such that content must be linked. This means that users must first ensure that graphics have been uploaded to an accessible location before they can craft the wiki content.

But what if you could keep the benefits of SharePoint wikis but remove the need to grapple with the SharePoint editor? What if users could continue to author content as they have always done, in Word and then find a way to publish that content as a wiki article pages?

That's what Word to Wiki does - it allows Word compatible format documents hosted in a standard SharePoint document library to be published as a wiki article in a couple of button clicks, and there's no need to pre-load graphical content that's all uploaded automatically to a SharePoint picture library!

This is the free version of the product known as Word to Wiki Online (Lite) and it can simply be downloaded and installed from the App Store and used indefinitely by every user in your organization. There are no ads or gimmicks, simply use the product as you need, although we would appreciate feedback and suggestions for improvement.

We do offer paid for licensed versions of Word to Wiki which can be deployed as a traditional SharePoint farm solution and a more feature rich version of the cloud based solution called Word to Wiki Online (Pro) is under development.

Obviously, these paid versions of Word to Wiki offer more features and capabilities than you get with the free version including:

Multiple document processing

Asynchronous processing

Metadata mapping

Automated publishing (Word to Wiki farm solution only)

Section publishing - break up the source Word documents into several articles based on section breaks (Word to Wiki Online Pro only)

Cross site and site collection publishing

Cross farm publishing (Word to Wiki farm solution only)

Support for SharePoint 2010 (Word to Wiki farm solution only)

Word to Wiki Online (Lite)

by Kaboodle Software