An Enterprise Wiki is a publishing site for sharing and updating large volumes of information across an enterprise. If an organization needs a large, centralized knowledge repository that is designed to both store and share information on an enterprise-wide scale, consider using an Enterprise Wiki.

In case you are looking for a place to host your Enterprise Wiki Sharepoint site, please have a look at ASPHostCentral.com. With the lowest and most affordable Sharepoint Server 2010 hosting price, you can maximize the use of this template for the benefits of your company/organizations.

Comparison of Enterprise Wikis with Team Sites

The Team Site template provides a flexible way to create content. This template includes a cross-browser Rich Text editor and in-line auto-completion. The Team Site template enables collaboration across teams within an organization or across organizations. Team Sites address two key concerns for anyone responsible for ensuring the integrity of an organization's content

- Editorial control   Administrators of a Team Site, or anyone with Full Control permissions on a Team Site, can allow a subset of users to edit entries and allow all users to read the entries
- Version control    Users can view previous versions of an entry and see when and by whom changes were made. If the changes were incorrect or inappropriate, the entry could be rolled back to an earlier version

In SharePoint Server 2010, the Team Site template home page is a wiki page. The Enterprise Wiki template uses the publishing features of SharePoint Server 2010 to add page ratings, managed metadata, and customization capabilities. Integration with Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2010 makes it easy to modify the display of content by changing page layouts and implement consistent branding by changing master pages

Uses and benefits of Enterprise Wikis

Enterprise wikis help organizations collect, organize, and distribute information. Enterprise wikis often become repositories for an organization's unstated knowledge, which otherwise might not be stored anywhere. Enterprise wikis can encourage informal learning and sharing tips with other users, which can reduce the need for formal training or continuous IT support

Limitations of Enterprise Wikis

Because an Enterprise wiki can generate a high level of network traffic, you might find it necessary to configure a single site collection and a single, dedicated Microsoft SQL Server database. If the Microsoft SQL Server database is shared, users might experience slower performance

Enterprise Wiki pages cannot be converted or migrated to pages on a Team Site without using custom code. Because Enterprise Wikis are used with the publishing feature in SharePoint Server 2010, there are significant differences between an Enterprise Wiki site and a Team Site

The new packaging and deployment stuff for SharePoint 2010 is certainly a lot better than VSeWSS but there are a few things missing, such as the ability to add a WCF service as a project item. One of these days I’ll build a template to do it but for now here’s a quick step by step guide.

Add SVC file to Layouts folder

To make a Windows Communication Framework service available we need to host it somewhere. Since SharePoint runs on IIS, we need to create a .svc file with details of the service implementation. Of course before we create the file we need somewhere to put it and for the purposes of this demonstration we’ll use a custom subfolder within the %sproot%\TEMPLATE\Layouts folder. We can set up this folder automatically using our Visual Studio project

1. From the Project menu select Add SharePoint “Layouts” Mapped Folder. You’ll notice that a new folder is added to the solution
2. We can now go ahead and add our MyWCFService.svc file. In the Layouts\<MyProjectName> folder. Add a new XML File named MyWCFService.svc
3. Replace the contents of the file with the following code

Token Replacement in Visual Studio

Visual Studio 2010 allows the use of replaceable tokens when creating SharePoint solution packages. Our .svc file makes use of the token $SharePoint.Project.AssemblyFullName$ that will be replaced when the package is built, by the 4 part assembly name for the associated assembly. However, tokens are not automatically replaced in files with an .svc extension. Thankfully this is a simple problem to resolve.

1. Navigate to C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v10.0\SharePointTools
2. Open the Microsoft.VisualStudio.SharePoint.targets file. You’ll find that this is an Xml format file that defines various configuration settings for building SharePoint projects
3. Find the TokenReplacementFileExtensions element and append svc to the list of file extensions as shown

<%@ Assembly Name="$SharePoint.Project.AssemblyFullName$"%>
<% @ServiceHost Service="MyProject.MyService" %>


Adding WCF service configuration to SharePoint

As well as an .svc file, IIS also needs to reads the configuration of the WCF service from the web.config file. For the purposes of this quick how-to we’ll make the necessary changes manually

1. Open the web.config file for our application (this will be found at C:\inetpub\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories\80\web.config if the application is the first application running on port 80).
2. In the system.serviceModel element add the following configuration details

<serviceHostingEnvironment aspNetCompatibilityEnabled="true" />
<bindings>
    <basicHttpBinding>
        <binding name="MyDemoBinding">
            <security mode="TransportCredentialOnly">
                <transport clientCredentialType="Ntlm" />
            </security>
        </binding>
    </basicHttpBinding>
</bindings>
<behaviors>
    <serviceBehaviors>
        <behavior name="MyDemoBehavior">
            <serviceMetadata httpGetEnabled="true" />
            <serviceDebug includeExceptionDetailInFaults="false" />
        </behavior>
    </serviceBehaviors>
</behaviors>
<services>
    <service behaviorConfiguration="MyDemoBehavior" name="MyProject.MyService">
        <endpoint address="" binding="basicHttpBinding" bindingConfiguration="MyDemoBinding" contract="MyProject.IMyService">
        <identity>
            <dns value="localhost" />
        </identity>
    </endpoint>
    <host>
        <baseAddresses>
            <add baseAddress=”http://localhost/_layouts/MyProjectName” />
        </baseAddresses>
    </host>
    </service>
</services>

Note: In an ideal world we’d add some code to our SharePoint solution that would automatically add the appropriate configuration details to the web.confg file but that's a story for another dayWe’re now ready to deploy the service to SharePoint.