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Time to Say Goodbye to Teams Wikis
In July 2022, Microsoft announced the cessation of support for the Teams Wiki. In January 2023, they said that an app would be available to move content from Wikis to OneNote. That app took a while to arrive, but it’s available now (as per the revised date noted in MC496248). If you’re unsure if any wikis exist to be migrated, you can run a script to find wikis in standard channels.
Microsoft’s support documentation explains the process of moving a wiki to OneNote. This post summarizes some points about the migration not covered there.
Migrating Wiki Content
When you migrate a Teams wiki, the target is the shared OneNote notebook that’s part of the resources provisioned in the team’s SharePoint Online site. Figure 1 shows the contents of the Site Assets document library in a site used by the Office 365 for IT Pros authors to store the chapters and other contents for the eBook. You can see that the notebook file dates from February 19, 2016, which is when we started using the Microsoft 365 group to organize our files, The notebook name reflects the original name of the eBook.
A team channel can have multiple wiki tabs (Figure 2). Each channel has a folder in the Teams Wiki Data document library in the team’s SharePoint site which holds the wiki content. This article explains how SharePoint stores Wiki content.
After running the migration app, the wiki content is set to be read-only and a copy of the content moves into the OneNote notebook. Each channel becomes a notebook section while each wiki tab becomes a page within the channel section. Team members can access the content through:
- The Notes tab that the migration app automatically adds to the channel (Figure 3). Some people find that removing the old Wiki tab and renaming the Notes tab to Wiki makes it easier for users to find content that they work with.
- The OneNote web app (accessed from the Office 365 app launcher)
- The OneNote desktop app.
The text in content moved to OneNote remains indexed and discoverable by a content search. OneNote items are not supported by content search preview but are accessible when downloaded by a content search export. The preview function of Microsoft Purview eDiscovery Premium does support a basic preview of OneNote items. However, there’s no indication of where in the notebook the text is found by the content search,
There’s no way to migrate all wikis in a tenant at one time. Users must move wikis over individually (any team member allowed to add a channel tab can do the migration).
Wikis in Private and Shared Channels
Microsoft’s migration utility doesn’t handle wikis for private and shared channels. If you use a wiki in those channels, the easiest way to dela with them is to:
- Open the wiki.
- Copy the information.
- Paste it into a Word document stored in the document library of the site used by the private or shared channel. Alternatively, paste the content into the notebook belonging to the team site.
Easy Transition
According to MC496248, Teams wikis will be inaccessible in January 2024. Moving to OneNote isn’t onerous. It just takes a little planning and user education. Isn’t that always the case?
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Too late. Already moved a few i had to OneNote manually 🙂 It is actually useful as i can have all such notes scattered in different channels in one place in my OneNote.
So for the referenced powershell to locate wikis in the tenant – would that identify wikis with content if they are inside a private or shared channel of a team?
Moving to OneNote isn’t onerous… maybe if you only have a few Wiki tabs.. troublesome if you have many, in private channels, with many pages. I’m still hoping that we’re not the only ones having this issue, and MS releases an update Migration tool that does private channels too.