Retirement of Teams Wiki - everything you need to know

The article gathers everything about retirement of wiki functionality in Teams. Timeline, details, proactive actions.

In January 2023 Microsoft announced the retirement of wiki functionality in Teams. This article talks about everything you need to know to be prepared for it, when the time comes.

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The article was last updated in October 2023.

TL;DR

Below are the more important information from the article:

Wiki migration tool is generally available
OneNote is the tool replacing wiki in channels
Loop is the new platform for meeting notes
There's a script available to estimate the impact of this change
Microsoft has plenty of learning materials about OneNote

If you want to know the details, keep reading. If you stop here, thanks for your short visit!

Announcement

Wiki will be retired from Teams. It was first announced by Microsoft in the beginning of January 2023:

If you want to check the announcement here is the link (requires admin account to access) Message Center entry MC496248. You can also read it on unofficial M365 Changelog (no account required).

The entry was updated in June:

Microsoft's announcement with July updates

When will wiki be retired from Teams?

We are currently approaching last step of the Wiki removal. In January 2024 Wiki tab in channels and Wiki app will not be reachable in Teams.

When the last stage is rolled out, users will not be able to transfer their data. The only way to do access the data will be via SharePoint.

Currently, users are still able to export channel wiki into OneNote. For new channels, Notes tab is automatically added.

What will change with Wiki tab?

When entering the empty wiki, we get the suggestion to add Notes tab:

For any wiki with content, we can either access it via the Wiki app or export to Notes (=OneNote):

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We can enforce this experience by adding content to empty wiki in the app. We will then have the option to export them to the Notes tab.

After the migration, Wiki tab will have one button, redirecting to the Notes tab:

How does the migration process look like?

We start in the wiki tab. It shows a button Export to notes:

After clicking it we will see the progress screen:

And then the confirmation screen:

After confirming with Finish we'll be redirected to the Notes tab. The tab is the default name for a OneNote tab in the channel.

The context pop-up says that each page from wiki was saved as a separate page in the section. The section name comes from the channel name. For details see To which section is the wiki migrated?.

Next pop-up will suggest to delete the Wiki tab:

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If we click Wiki tab after the migration, it will show the read-only snapshot of the wiki at the moment of migration. The tab will not reflect any changes made afterwards.

To which section is the wiki migrated?

Migration of wiki creates a section named after the channel. The pages contain the wiki name and page title separated by underscore. For example, Getting started from Wiki in test2 channel will land under test2 section in Notes. The page will be named Wiki_Getting started:

Structure of migrated wiki pages in Notes

Warning
For some reason, pages under General channel with only one wiki will not have Wiki_ added to the page name in Notes:

How are multiple wikis migrated?

Our channel can have multiple wiki tabs. All wikis will be migrated to the same section in Notes. They will have different prefixes added to page name. With this, we'll distinguish them easily:

Different prefixes for different wiki tabs

What are the known issues with migration?

There is no official list of known issues. However, based on my experience we might see one of the cases described below. The remediation is to migrate the broken content manually.

Pages title not appearing correctly

It happened to me once that page titles didn't populate correctly. At the page list all were shown as Untitled Page while the title on the page itself was correct:

Broken pages

I saw the issue happening once when the title had a slash character /. When I tried to open the page in OneNote it displayed the error message:

Waiting multiple days didn't fix the issue. However, I was not able to reproduce it later. The page I migrated later had no issue:

Duplicated pages

From time to time, when we close the last modal with the top-right X button, we might be able to run the migration once again:

As a result, we'll see the duplicated pages in Notes:

Incorrect section linked

When the channel has the brackets, Notes tab might lead to incorrect section in the notebook. I didn't find any pattern how it works.

In some cases, the first section in the notebook was linked. In others, the random section.

Section links stop working

I would say this is expected. In Wiki we were able to get permalink of the section. Those links does not work in OneNote.

Are private channel wiki retired?

Yes, wiki tab are retired from private channels, too. However, they have no migration tool. According to Export a wiki to a OneNote notebook:

Private channel wikis will also be deprecated. Unlike with standard channels, there will be no migration experience for private channels, so users will need to copy-paste the content into OneNote manually.

Are meeting notes retired?

Yes, meeting notes are replaced by Loop-powered solution: Collaborative Notes.

The roadmap entry for collaborative notes did not mention Loop before the official announcement. The entry initially said:

Every Teams meeting now comes with a collaborative OneNote canvas. Create notes from the Teams calendar or during a meeting. You can easily recall your notes and manage your tasks directly from OneNote.

That was a little bit unclear but now it's saying more (emphasis mine):

Collaborative notes allow meeting attendees to co-create and collaborate on their meeting agenda, notes, and action items. Since Collaborative notes are a Loop component, it is always in sync regardless of how many places they live in. Assigned Tasks in Collaborative notes automatically sync with ToDo & Planner.

If you want to read more about the Microsoft Loop, here are some useful resources:

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Do you know where are the notes created for a specific meeting? They land on OneDrive of the first person that clicked the Notes tab. Not very intuitive, but similar to how recordings are stored.

What's the difference between wiki and OneNote?

OneNote can be considered wiki on steroids. Wiki was always meant to be a simple text editor. The main things that are making wiki less usable than OneNote are:

Cannot be used outside of Teams
Limited formatting options
No full-text search
No recycle bin
No offline use
Poorly designed version history

If you want to read more, I recommend the following articles: Don't use Teams wiki – Vesa Nopanen and What's wrong with Microsoft Teams built-in wiki? Five built-in wiki limitations that you should know.

What's the experience for Teams 2.0?

As new Teams client doesn't support Wiki app it's not suitable for Wiki migration. In fact, new client doesn't show Wiki tab at all:

Difference between standard and new client

The new experience is far from ideal - it should at least indicate there is a Wiki app available.

Upcoming OneNote improvements

On the other hand, OneNote got a nice refresh in 2022. There are more improvements coming, such as new navigation options, dictating notes.

If you want to be up-to-date, here's the OneNote section of the M365 roadmap.

Can I export list of wiki users in an organization?

Now when we know what to expect, let's think how many users will be affected by this change. Are our users using wiki at all? How to check this?

Tony Redmond has written an excellent guide describing How to Find Teams Channels With a Wiki Tab.

For meeting notes, the only discovery way I can think of is via eDiscovery. Knowing that meeting notes are kept under OneDrive > Microsoft Teams Data > Wiki, we'd need to find the people with such folder existing. But that only covers people, who created the notes, not talking about the ones reading them.

Can I remove wiki tab programatically?

Removing wiki tab is possible using Microsoft Graph. Andres Bohren has written a guide showing this: How to remove Microsoft Teams wiki tab with Microsoft Graph.

Tip
Although the article is in German, browser's built-in translation works just fine. If you want, you can also go directly to the translated article.

How can I prepare for Teams wiki retirement?

The wiki retirement in inevitable. How to better prepare for it? I think the most important part is about education - promote OneNote across the organization as it'll be our new friend in the upcoming days.

Microsoft has some good resources you can use to get people familiar with OneNote: OneNote help & learning and OneNote video training.

Next part is discovery - find out who uses wiki and prepare a targeted communication about migrating to OneNote. Check the section Can we export list of wiki users in an organization to find out how to do that.

Last, but not least - stay in the loop. Get back to this post frequently for updates. Keep checking the Message Center and M365 Roadmap. Make sure you don't miss important updates.

You can also bookmark this support article Export a wiki to a OneNote notebook. It seems to have a lot of useful information (including timeline). Such information is not mentioned anywhere else.

What was the experience in the initial phases?

At the first stage, the Teams application was suggesting adding OneNote tab:

The empty Wiki tab was not locked yet. We were still be able to make some edits.

When we went to the page with existing content, we were seeing a different bar:

That experience was generally available around April 2023.

Note
The bars were visible to users with rights to add or remove tab in a channel. For others, there was no bar.

Summary

There's a lot of things uncovered for the Teams wiki retirement. However, there are things we can already do to be prepared.

Once we're prepared, we only can hope that Microsoft provides a nice transition experience for the discovery, migration and decommission of the wiki.

Bye, bye, wiki! You'll be missed (but only by some of us) 😉