Team Project Wiki in Azure DevOps: First Look

Team Project Wiki was rolled out for Azure DevOps a couple of days back as a preview feature. For me this is a much-anticipated feature that felt missing and this would be a first look in to Team Project Wiki in Azure DevOps.

Navigate to your Azure DevOps account and open up one of your Team Projects. You should see a new menu item in the top menu bar called Wiki ( denotes a preview feature) Click on this to create your first team wiki

If you don’t see this Wiki* menu item in the menu bar, its might be that this preview feature is not active for your team project. But we can enable/disable preview features quite easily. Click on the Profile pic/avatar icon on the top right corner and from the drop-down list, select Preview Features menu item.

This will take you to a side panel where you can enable/disable preview features for yourself as a user or for the entire team. From the drop-down menu select for this account [account-name] menu options to see the preview features available for the Azure DevOps account.

In the list of preview features, you should see a new Wiki toggle button that enables/disables the Wiki feature. Make sure this is enabled.

Once this is done. Click on the Create Wiki Button to get started on creating your first wiki on Azure DevOps.

You will be taken to a New Wiki page edit view where you can start creating pages for your wiki. You can add a title for the wiki page (1) and you are provided with some basic formatting options via the formatting tool bar (2). You also have 2 tabs; Edit and Preview.

After editing you can save the wiki page by clicking on the Save button (3) and your current Wiki page, other wiki pages and subpages are listed in the left-hand side panel called Pages (4). Azure DevOps Wikis supports almost all of Markdown syntax. So, if you are familiar with using Markdown for your work (e.g. GitHub README.md files etc.) you will feel right at home. While you are editing the page, you can quickly switch to the Preview tab to see a preview of what you are writing. The following image shows the preview of the text in the edit view.

After finishing the editing, you can click on the Save button (3) to save the page. You will be prompted to add a message for revisions for the wiki. Its, always a best practice to do so. This makes it easy to track and understand the changes in each revision.

Click save again to finish saving. You can edit an existing wiki page by clicking on the ellipsis button and using the menu that pops up clicking on Edit.. menu item.

Apart from this this menu provides functionality to delete a page, View the revisions for the page, adding a new Sub page, Copying the page paths for links etc. and you can also select a page from the list of pages to be set as the Wiki Homepage.

Also, you can access another menu by clicking on More dropdown and manage security for the Azure DevOps Team Project. Also, if you want, your wiki can be cloned as well using this same menu.

Conclusion

Azure DevOps Team Project Wiki is a nice feature and a must have. Though when comparing with fully fledged software like JIRA Confluence, at the moment Team Project Wiki is in a very infant stage. But it was a must have and a feature that was missing in Azure DevOps and since it’s here and it’s preview feature, it can only get better in the future.

I’m eager to see how Team Project Wiki would evolve. I’d love to see features like the ability to link directly to work items in Azure DevOps in the Wiki pages, add charts, graphs that uses Work items, data coming from work items, builds and releases etc. These features will make Team Project Wiki even better and would be a real competitor.

This was a first look in to Azure DevOps Team Project Wiki (Preview) feature, and I’ll see you in the next article.