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A lot of Microsoft Teams users store their company data in the built-in wiki and love it, until they find that it lacks quite a few key features, one of which is a search function.
Not being able to search the Teams built-in Wikis disqualifies it as a fully functional knowledge database.
In this blog post I’ll share with you less of a baked solution, and more of a workaround that I found on the Microsoft Community forums [1].
This workaround will allow you to do a full-text search through the Microsoft Teams built-in wiki. Follow the step-by-step guide in this post, and you'll be able to perform a full-text search with highlighting through your wiki content right inside Microsoft Teams.
We’ll use the fact that the Microsoft Teams built-in wiki stores all of its data in a document library in the SharePoint team site of the team that created it. All wiki pages are stored as files with .mht extensions inside a folder named after the channel in “Teams Wiki Data.”
So, to do a full-text search inside the built-in wiki, we’ll scope the SharePoint full-text search to the “Teams Wiki Data” folder and “.mth” extensions. Then we’ll add a SharePoint search function as a “Website” tab to Microsoft Teams channel.
We’re done with theory, now let’s jump into detailed step-by-step instructions.
Step-By-Step Instructions
Find a link to the SharePoint site of your team. If you already have that link, you can skip this step.
Otherwise, the easiest way to find where exactly your wiki data is stored inside SharePoint, is to get to SharePoint from your “Files” channel tab.
- Open the “Files” tab at the top of your channel window.
- Click the “...” next to “Add cloud storage” at the top and go to “Open in SharePoint.”
- Once in SharePoint, go to “Return to classic SharePoint.”
- On the top right corner of the page, find “Search this site.” Search for “*.mht” (w/o quotes). Now you should see the search results with your wiki pages.
- Copy the URL of that SharePoint page–we’ll use it to create a Website tab in your Microsoft Teams channel.
- To create a Website tab, go to the “+” next to your other tabs in the channel and search for “Website.”
- Insert the URL you copied from SharePoint and save!
Woo hoo! You can now perform a full-text search through all the wiki content that you have. The only big issue with this solution is that you can’t open the wiki page right from the search tab. You will have to manually find the exact page, but you can grab the wiki and channel name from the link.
Do not remove “*.mht” from the query, it’ll scope the search to only wiki pages.
Any Other Options?
As stated at the beginning, this method is more of a loophole than a baked solution.
If you want a solid solution, check out Perfect Wiki. We are a feature rich knowledge base app for Microsoft Teams, with full-text typo-tolerant search through all your pages, instant export/import functions, and much more.
Try us out in Microsoft Teams for FREE for 14 days!
Also, you can vote on Microsoft Feedback Portal to implement the search function inside the built-in wiki (it’s about time).
Tried out the solution? Share it with a colleague and on social media!
Sources
Microsoft Community Forums — "How to Search in a Wiki?" • June 26, 2020
