How-to Search Through the Microsoft Teams Built-In Wiki

September 22, 2020 by Ilia Pirozhenko • 5 min read • Microsoft Teams

This post is brought to you by Perfect Wiki, a tool that helps you create a database of your company resources right in Microsoft Teams. Try us out for FREE today, no sign-in or credit card required.

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.

Guide How to Search Through Microsoft Teams Built-In Wiki

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

  1. 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.

    1. Open the “Files” tab at the top of your channel window.
    2. Click the “...” next to “Add cloud storage” at the top and go to “Open in SharePoint.”
    Guide How to Search Through Microsoft Teams Built-In Wiki
  2. Once in SharePoint, go to “Return to classic SharePoint.”Guide How to Search Through Microsoft Teams Built-In Wiki
  3. 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.Guide How to Search Through Microsoft Teams Built-In Wiki
  4. Copy the URL of that SharePoint page–we’ll use it to create a Website tab in your Microsoft Teams channel.Guide How to Search Through Microsoft Teams Built-In Wiki
  5. To create a Website tab, go to the “+” next to your other tabs in the channel and search for “Website.”Guide How to Search Through Microsoft Teams Built-In Wiki
  6. Insert the URL you copied from SharePoint and save!Guide How to Search Through Microsoft Teams Built-In Wiki

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.

Add us to Microsoft Teams for FREE today - no credit card or sign-in required.

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

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