Forget me not, love is a Wiki Page

When i first started this post, i though "Why isnt anyone using gif to show the steps instead of individual images?" I see it now, sorry if the page makes you dizzy.

Sometimes the easy solutions are the ones that elude us. I was recently asked to take an Employee Handbook and make it available to all employees on the SharePoint Intranet portal. The handbook was a nice PDF document with all sorts of useful information like vacation policies, company holidays and who to call if there is an emergency. I placed the document in the HR department site, waited for the next crawl to run and made sure it was showing in search results. Job well done, time to kick back and relax with Diet Coke! About a week later the calls started to come in.

“Hey James, I cant find the policy on maternity leave.”
“Hey James, where is the policy on training?”
“Is there a policy on working from home?”

I went to SharePoint search and queried for those terms and it returned my Employee Handbook. I called my co-worker back and asked for more details. The problem he was having wasn't search being broken, it was usability. The co-worker says to me “If I search for the training policy, I shouldn't just be taken to the document but instead I should be taken to the content inside the document.” Now I understand the problem! The PDF wasn't going to cut it. How was I going to provide all this content, make it search-able, make it easy to locate specific details and make sure it's secure? Enter my dear old friend the Wiki Page. When it comes down to it, the Employee Handbook is just a collection of chapters and subjects. I can leverage these chapters and natural breaks for my new Employee Handbook. On the HR site, I created a new Wiki Page Library and I called it Employee Handbook.

The HR team is concerned about security and accountability of the content in the handbook. I will add content approval to the items in the library. This gives the HR team the ability to make changes to pages and it will require the content to be reviewed before it is made available to employees. This means I next have to alter the default security settings. I do this by

• Click on Page
• Click on Library Settings
• Click on Permissions for this document library
• Click on Stop Inheriting Permissions
• Add the HR Group with Contributor rights, everyone else with read only.

Now our permissions are set, but how is content to be updated? The next step is to set up versioning and content approval. Versioning allows us to make changes to a document and it acts like a draft. The draft can be altered as many times as needed until it is then committed as a published version. The content approval piece allows a final reviewers' approval before the item is available to all consumers.

• Click on Page
• Click on Library Settings
• Click on Versioning Settings
• Click Yes on require content approval for submitted items
• Click the radio button for “Create major and minor (draft) versions.
• Optionally select the maximum number of drafts and major versions to keep
• Optionally choose if the page needs to be checked out prior to editing.

Next we need to set up the approval process. We will use an out of the box workflow for this. (Make sure you have activated Workflows in your site collection features)

• Open library settings
• Click on Workflow Settings
• Add a workflow.
• Choose OOB (Out of the Box) workflow
• Assign a name and check the box to start when major version is published.
• You only need to add an “assigned to”. I also chose to add Request description.
• At the bottom, choose the Enable Content Approval check-box. When approval is granted, this will publish your page when approved.

When a page is created or modified, it will email the HR manager (Playing the role is me) and I can review the page and approve it. Now that the “plumbing” is done we can actually get to work creating our handbook. When I create a wiki library, a page called “how to use this library” is created and I recommend reading it. I won't go through content creation here because its already well written in the “How to use this library” section. Next I will walk through creating a page and approving the content.

• I have my Hours of Operation page staged. (see the page “How to use this library” to stage a page)
• Create the page.
• The information panel shows me that the file is currently a minor version (0.1) and that the page is checked in.
• I added my content and now I need the boss to approve it.
• I click Save and Publish.
• I fill in the required information and start the Workflow.
• The workflow will send an email asking for the item to be reviewed and to approve the content. At this point the document is waiting in a holding pattern.

Now the approver has their job to do.

• In Outlook, I receive an email alerting me to content that needs approval.
• Clicking the top line in the email takes me to the content.
• I review the changes and choose the “Publish” tab.
• From here, I can approve, reject or cancel the approval process. (I will approve)
• I can Add Comments if needed.
• I chose to require several levels of approval. This approval will be the final approval that goes out before the content is available to all consumers. If I had a department with multiple people I could assign this task to an HR VP for example. It's just me so I received the task to approve the changes. At this point I can review the page and request additional changes to be made or assign the task to another person. I will choose to approve the page as is.
• My content is now published, searchable and viewable to the entire company.

Now when I search, I get the exact page, a preview and the content I want to see and not some PDF document.