Two options to export your content from Microsoft Teams built-in Wiki

Microsoft Teams is a great tool. But it’s built-in wiki lacks some important features (full-text search, exporting & printing options). In this post, I’ll show you several ways on how to export your data from the built-in wiki and convert it to PDF or print. During my investigation on this theme, I found two ways to do it:

• Export data from SharePoint and manually convert it to PDF
• Export data from Microsoft Teams built-in Wiki with Perfect Wiki

The first option is free but requires a lot of manual work, the second option is paid, but it has a free trial 14 days, so at least you can try it. Below I’ll review each option in detail and describe its pros & cons. Before we go deeper into this theme, I should mention that to export your content, you need to have admin access to the channel/team where your wiki is located; otherwise, none of these options will work for you.

Export data from SharePoint and manually convert it to PDF

It’s not a secret that the built-in wiki of Microsoft Teams stores its data in a document library of the SharePoint team site belonging to the team where the content is created. Microsoft Teams built-in wiki doesn’t create anything in SharePoint until the first time someone opens the wiki. At this point, Microsoft Teams creates a folder named after the channel in the “Teams Wiki Data” document library on the team site.

So, to export content from the built-in wiki, you need to perform the next steps:

1. Open your SharePoint site. Typically it will be something like https://%domain_name%.sharepoint.com/sites/%domain_name%, in my case it was https://rd17.sharepoint.com/sites/rd17. If you can’t find the exact link, don’t worry; I’ll show you a tip on how to find it with the Perfect Wiki below quickly.
2. Navigate to the “Teams Wiki Data” directory.
3. Select folder named after the channel, in my case, “Consumer Support.”
4. Click “Download.”

Now you have a zip archive with all the wiki pages of the channel. The pages are in the .mht format, which can’t be simply opened by the browser or any other common software. To fix it, you need to rename all files to .html extension one by one.

After this operation is done, you can open files in the browser and export it to PDF or print. As you can notice each page has some unwanted text in the header, which unfortunately you should remove manually.

Pros: It’s free.

Cons: It can be tricky to find the correct link to the SharePoint Folder. Also, it requires a lot of manual work to remove unwanted auto-generated text and change files extensions.

Export data from Microsoft Teams built-in Wiki with Perfect Wiki

Perfect Wiki is a feature-rich replacement for the built-in Microsoft Teams Wiki. It's fully integrated into Microsoft Teams and works natively.

To export data from built-in Microsoft Teams wiki with Perfect Wiki:

1. Add Perfect Wiki to the channel where you have a built-in wiki with desired pages to export.
2. Click “Import,” then in the opened dialog, click the “Download link.” This link will open a SharePoint folder where pages from the built-in wiki are located.
3. Download the zip folder with the wiki content and unzip it.
4. In the Perfect Wiki, import dialog click “Import from HTML/EML/MHT” and upload .mht files from the archive.
5. All pages should appear in the Perfect Wiki; you can print them, export to PDF or HTML

In comparison to default wiki, you can export or print wiki pages in 1-click without unnecessary steps.

Also, Perfect Wiki is smart enough to remove all unwanted text from the imported files automatically.

Pros: Link for download is generated automatically—no need to change the extensions of files. You can export any page to PDF or HTML on demand or even print it right from the Microsoft Teams.

Cons: It’s a paid solution. It has a 14 days free trial, but after that, the cheapest plan is $3.5/mo.

Any other options?

It’s clear that there is no easy way to export data from Microsoft Teams built-in wiki. Nevertheless, it’s doable. If you know any other more elegant way to export data, let me know; otherwise, I encourage everyone to vote for this feature to be done by Microsoft on UserVoice.

Sources:

• Inside the Teams Wiki by Tony Redmond • October 5, 2018