

Microsoft has delivered one of the first pieces they said they would with an updated UI for the SharePoint Document Library. The UI is that which has been tested on OneDrive for Business for months and announced on stage in Stockholm back in November to arrive along with many other changes to give life back into the SharePoint Team Site. This change allows us to get a glimpse of the future planned for SharePoint, let’s take a look at it.
Before we dive into the future of SharePoint, let’s look at the new interface presented to us and point out some of what we see.
Here are additional screenshots showing some of these changes:
The Search in a Document Library
Managing the Metadata on your files from the Details Panel
Pinning files in your Library and managing them
Changing which columns are being displayed
Working with and managing your Library Views
New ability to add Links to almost anything
You can now add a link in your library and manage it as if it were a file like the others. However, at the moment of writing this I didn’t see a way to edit the actual URL.
I think the changes happening to SharePoint are going to be the hardest on the “SharePoint People”. Those working and invested on a platform that, let’s be honest, didn’t change too much since 2007. But slowly, this whole talk about about needing to change and adapt will arrive at our doors.
Though the change to the Document Library is on SharePoint Online with Office 365, there were a lot of discussions around this change from the entire SharePoint community. “Is it good? Where is the ribbon? Why didn’t I know as an administrator?” and I’ll go over these in a second.
Before I do, I want to stress that SharePoint needs to change to stay in the game.
We’re in a growing tech age where new solutions are popping everywhere and at a faster pace. Our end users often don’t want to deal with the administrators to do work and if they can subscribe, often for free, to things like Dropbox or Slack, Box, Salesforce, etc… you name it, it exists, they’ll gladly do it.
The traditional SharePoint isn’t going away, we’ve seen that and it’s why so much talk around Hybrid is being had. So that those organizations already invested in or where the culture still fits with the SharePoint model we’re used to, can continue.
But those going to Office 365, looking to subscribe and not worry about setting up Exchange Servers or SharePoint Servers with different types of sites and content types, etc… they need something they can start using, is easy to adopt and doesn’t require immense amount of support or architecture planning.
This new UI for the SharePoint Document Library is but a piece of the vision for a new “modern” SharePoint Team Site. And yes, I know that’s the Microsoft marketing being regurgitated there, but we do need a site that teams or groups can consume quickly. For the same reason, many of you create a folder in Dropbox, put some files in, maybe invite others and start working.
At the moment, this change only affects those that have opted-in to Office 365’s First Release program. This means you asked to get updates as soon as they’re available and thus test out the new shiny toys before everyone.
Now having opted-in to Office 365 isn’t enough, the new document library is actually turned off everywhere by default. It’s left to the people using it, in their respective teams to choose whether or not they want to try it out, stay as it is or revert back after testing it out.
Users can press the x to close it or check it out. This isn’t unlike many products we subscribe to these days both on a consumer level or business.
Could Microsoft have published a blog two weeks earlier to let the administrators know that this was coming? Absolutely, and I’m sure we are bound to hear a lot more in a few weeks when they do their online event on the Future of SharePoint.
But again, you have to have opted for First Release and then users of the document library have to opt-in to use it. I say this, but like you my first reaction was to run to my customers that are on First Release to make sure all is ok. And even those with a few thousand users were thrilled with the change.
This matched the reaction we had seen back in early November when Microsoft had presented this to MVPs under NDA.
How can you prepare for the upcoming roll out
Needless to say, things are changing. And though our traditional SharePoint is still there with a new SharePoint 2016, we also need this new Team Site within the SharePoint suite.
This was a first step of many in delivering that new SharePoint Team Site. And as Microsoft changed to keep up and adapt with the times, it’s important we do too.
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