Office 365 – Microsoft Teams – a look under the hood of the wiki pages

On the Microsoft tech community site I found a post from Jan Hajek about the new wiki sites that are part of the new team sites.

I always had the idea that the wiki pages were stored somewhere outside the scope of SharePoint.

But I had been missing in my investigations before.

The important step I had missed was that I didn’t click on the wiki tab in teams. I created a new team and then went to have a look for the data.

Once you’ve clicked on the wiki link the list will become available under recent lists. This list is a hidden list, but nevertheless just a SharePoint list. After click ing on the link under recent the list is opened and it will  show 3 items.

• Wiki
• Page
• Section

Ok, I’m opening the Wiki item first. There isn’t much exciting stuff in here.

Then I had a look at Page Item

Then finally the Section Item

Ok, so far there is nothing exciting there other than that Microsoft must have decided not to use content types as all of the above images show the content type for this Wiki list is Item.

So I updated my wiki page:

My wiki list item hasn’t changed at all.

My wiki page now has a title

Then I had a look at the section item:

Ok, that is great. A single field that holds all my html. Nothing complicated there then.

Time to create a second page by clicking on the little icon at the top left:

Hmm, this is great I’m now having 5 items. with 2 pages and 2 sections and the titles are very helpfully called Wiki, Page and Section.

This could become quite tricky to many. I guess the general idea is that you don’t have to manage this.

Going further with my investigations. What happened when I add a link from one page to another.

So this is adding the links to the actual pages as you would access them through your browser:

Even though these wiki pages aren’t really, what I would call a wiki. They are something that can easily store some notes. And now that the information is stored in SharePoint lists, it might even be possible to deploy content to these lists.