2/5 UPDATE: We have a winner! It's... SharePoint 2010 Best Practices: Choosing Between AD Groups or SharePoint Groups - by Margriet. This article was featured on the home page of TechNet Wiki on 2/5.

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Welcome to Thursday's Community Win! For our community collaboration this week, I want you to pick the next TechNet Wiki Featured Article!

On the home page of TechNet Wiki, we feature four articles:

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/

Well, now you get to pick the next one!

Simply reply with a comment and let me know which article you want featured. Everybody gets one vote.

Your deadline is 2PM PST, Monday, 2/4/13.

Here are your five candidates to choose from:

BizTalk: List of Errors and Warnings, Causes and Solutions - by Sandro

How to Update PowerShell Help - by Tony

MSDN and TechNet Forum Support - by Ed 

Outlook, Outlook for Mac, and Entourage Version and Features Comparison Chart - by Henrik 

SharePoint 2010 Best Practices: Choosing Between AD Groups or SharePoint Groups - by Margriet

Which one do you think we should feature? Leave a comment! One vote per person.

Here's the tag of the previously featured Wiki articles. That's basically a list sorted by most recently edited. Or for lists sorted by technology or chronologically when it was featured, read the list at the bottom of the TechNet Wiki Featured Article Nominees article.

The options were pulled from the list of nominations. Do you want to nominate an article to get featured? Simply add it as a nominee in the Nominees section of the TechNet Wiki Featured Article Nominees article.

Wiki Wiki Wiki Wiki,

   - Ninja Ed

Welcome to Wiki Life Wednesday!

There is bit of a debate around perspectives of how to find content in the World Wide Web.

Some folks are all about Search. They're search-tastic.

Other folks are looking for the TOC, like in a Help file. They are lost because they cannot navigate.

Well, the world is changing a little to a flatter structure tied together by a search engine and tags instead. So the Navigators need to become Search-tastic. Isn't that how you navigate Wikipedia? You start with a search?

To help the people out who want TOCs, we built you a nice portal system on the Wiki home page.

Go there and click a blue box, like Technologies.

See Wiki Life: Microsoft Portals - Technologies, Platforms, Development, Cloud, Virtualization, Security, Management & Troubleshooting.

Gives you a nice TOC you can browse through.

Wow, I'm so glad somebody thought to link from the top of that article to this one about the Technology Tags. I love it when the community works together like that!

So you can obviously spend hours browsing through the different tag combinations as well.

See Wiki Life: Tags on a Wiki? Why Tags help make TechNet Wiki as AWESOME as it is!!!

And check out Wiki Life: How to filter TechNet Wiki articles by more than one tag.  

Seems like I'm writing a series of blog posts on Wiki navigation, eh? =^)

Well, if you think about it, what's the #1 way that you navigate in Wikipedia? Is it by search?

Maybe initially. Then probably not.

Is it the See Also and TOC-like lists at the bottom? Some I'm sure.

But I think the #1 way we navigate is by cross linking.

You don't believe me? Go to any Wikipedia article. Yeah, go. Open a new tab, type in the "W" word and go there. Do it! Now! Have you never read an ornery blog post before? Well here's one! Stop being lazy! Go open a tab and go to Wikipedia!

Are you there? Good. Now navigate to your favorite topic. Yeah, search.

Are you there? Now what do you see in the first sentence or paragraph? Do you see a link? Click it.

What you just did was follow a navigational path set up by the Wikipedia editors. Cross-linking exists to send you to the parent article (usually in the first sentence) and sister articles (sprinkled through the page).

Check out my article on TechNet Wiki: PowerPivot: Data Analysis Expressions (DAX) Language

What do you see in the first sentence? Yes, below the TOC. 

You see the parent technology, PowerPivot, with a link to this article: PowerPivot Overview

And on that page, in addition to overview info, you see links to all the other PowerPivot articles.

That's it! So simple! In one simple step, we can make each article easier to navigate!  

I just realized I've got an example on this very blog post! What do you see in the very first sentence of this blog post?

A link to the tag for this day of the week, so that you can browse all the Wiki Life articles. Cross-linking is magic! =^)

Leave a comment below if you tried cross-linking on your TechNet Wiki article! And paste in the URL of your TechNet Wiki article so that we can go check it out!

Jump on in! The Wiki is warm!

   - Ninja Ed

Hello and welcome everybody to our TNWiki Article Spotlight on Tuesday.

Have you ever searched the wiki for articles to a specific technology? Do you use the search bar? Do you scroll through the newest articles? Have I missed another option?

Of course, I missed one, which is my personal favorite - tags. Have you ever noticed the small words on the bottom of an article? This is also a possible choice for navigation. But every author can set tags like he/she prefers. So for what tag do I have to look for? The Technology Tags article will help you to find articles faster. Here you find an overview about several products and technologies and their appropriate tags plus a link to the search results.

- German Ninja Jan (Twitter, Blog, Profile)

Welcome to our Monday Interview with a Wiki Ninja!

Today's interview is with Joe Davies, technical writer on the SharePoint platform and architecture, formerly on Windows Server, and a key leader in our Wiki efforts around Test Lab Guides and Learning Roadmaps.

Who are you, where are you, and what do you do? What are your specialty technologies?

I am a Principal Writer in the SharePoint Platforms and Infrastructure writing team, working on the Redmond campus of Microsoft. I am responsible for authentication and identity management content for SharePoint 2013 and 2010, including new hybrid configurations that share data between an on-premises SharePoint 2013 farm and a SharePoint farm in Office 365.

In the past I have been a writer, trainer, and instructional designer for Windows Server, where I specialized in Windows networking technologies including TCP/IP, IPv6, IPsec, virtual private networks, wireless networks, and network access protection. For a list of my Microsoft Press books, see my Amazon.com page. I also wrote The Cable Guy column from 2000-2010.

What are your big projects right now?

Two big areas of interest for me right now are the expansion and integration of more graphical elements in content and efforts to develop and define troubleshooting content.

What do you do with TechNet Wiki, and how does that fit into the rest of your job?

I primarily use the TechNet Wiki to publish articles that would either benefit from direct community collaboration or are designed to enable the community to create their own articles. For example, for the Test Lab Guides, I have published a series of template articles and examples that allow the community to more easily create Test Lab Guide content.

I also use the TechNet Wiki to publish content that serves a specific niche function—such as FAQs or specialized portals—or for content that applies to multiple versions of products.

What is it about TechNet Wiki that interests you?

As a full-time technical writer at Microsoft, there is just not enough time to learn and experience all aspects of a product or technology. By its very nature, the type of content that I have time to write and publish is somewhat theoretical, reflecting well-defined and recommended uses and configuration.

However, customers typically take our products in directions we never imagined. The TechNet Wiki allows those working in the wild to add their voice and provide input on experiences, priorities, configurations, and best practices for a more complete documentation set that reflects real-world deployments.

On what Wiki articles do you spend most of your time?

I spend most of my time on the articles in the Test Lab Guides ecosystem, which includes portal pages, templates, examples, and test lab content. I also help maintain a set of SharePoint portal pages, ensuring that they reflect the content that the SharePoint team here at Microsoft publishes and other SharePoint community content.

What are your favorite Wiki articles you’ve contributed?

Some of my favorites include the Test Lab Guides and Learning Roadmaps portals. They provide an overview of what the content is trying to accomplish, links to content, and links to template articles that allow the community to create their own content.

What does success look like for TechNet Wiki?

Success for the TechNet Wiki is broad awareness as an authoritative repository for technical content and the ongoing and active contribution of content from an engaged community. IT pros using Microsoft products should know that they have a voice and a place to easily contribute their technical knowledge and experiences.

================================

Special thanks to Joe Davies for the interview!

What do you think of Joe's articles? Do you have any additional questions for Joe? Leave a comment below!

And remember to... Wiki While You Work! (or after work)

- Ninja Ed

Microsoft offers REST support in BizTalk Server 2013 through the WCF-WebHttp Adapter. This has been anticipated for a long time by BizTalk developers. A majority of the services in the cloud is REST based. When exposing a public API over the internet to handle CRUD operations on data REST has now generally considered the best option. Twitter, Google, Salesforce, eBay, Amazon all offer REST API's to use their services. This is just an example of the companies that support REST, there are many more. With the increase of mobile devices and light weight rich (Ajax) web applications over the years the adoption of REST grew more and more.

It will not be a surprise that a demand for REST support in BizTalk emerged. Nitin Mehrotra from Microsoft wrote a TechNet Wiki Article Invoke ReSTful Web Services with BizTalk Server 2010 describing a solution to consume Restful services with BizTalk 2010. Within the BizTalk community Mikael Håkansson wrote a REST Start Kit for BizTalk to provide support for REST.

With BizTalk Server 2013 there is an adapter, the WCF-WebHttp, that will support REST. The adapter gives you the ability to send messages to RESTful services through the WCF-WebHttp send adapter. With the receive location you can receive messages from a RESTful service. Through the send adapter you can do a GET request. This is widely used service operation when it comes to interacting with a RESTful service. Besides GET, there is DELETE, POST and PUT. With GET and DELETE operations you cannot send any payload. Since BizTalk sends out messagebodies you will need to configure the adapter. This configuration currently is not available yet and the current option (with BizTalk Server 2013 Beta) is to remove the message body with a pipeline. For POST and PUT request, the adapter uses the BizTalk message body part to the HTTP content/payload.

Microsoft BizTalk product group has made a good decision by supporting REST through the new BizTalk release 2013. Most of the services currently in the cloud are based on REST, which lead to more integration solution requiring communication with RESTful services. The integration solution can BizTalk Server as one of its components. Within an enterprise BizTalk Server can be the heart of the messaging infrastructure supporting many protocols. Adding REST support will mean that BizTalk will provide even more value. BizTalk Server 2013 adds support for REST, which will be cheered by developers and enterprises worldwide that use BizTalk.

- Ninja Steef-Jan (Blog, Wiki, Twitter, Profile)