“You Must Un-learn what You Have Learned!”

The public beta of SharePoint 2010 has been out for a few weeks now. Many people are discovering and blogging about some of the great new features you’re going to find. Yet there have also been some significant changes to existing features. These are things you may have been using every day in SharePoint 2007 and WSS 3.0, but which in SharePoint 2010 have moved or changed in ways could cause confusion to experienced users.

In this article I’m going to focus on changes the typical end-user would see. In future articles I’ll talk about changes for site owners and administrators.

If it Ain’t Broke…

SharePoint 2007 took a lot of heat for having certain “quirks” in its user interface design. For 2010, much as they did for the Office clients in 2007, Microsoft put a lot of R&D into what it would take to make SharePoint easier for typical users. This resulted in a lot of changes.

Human beings are creatures of habit. With certain notable exceptions, we don’t much like change. Despite having worked through a non-intuitive learning curve, or sometimes because of it, we would rather keep doing things the way we are used to than learn new ways – even if those ways are better.

…Fix it Anyway

Only time will tell if the changes Microsoft made truly are for the better, but they’ve definitely been made. Let’s start by looking at the basic team site page in SharePoint 2010 side by side with its SharePoint 2007 equivalent:

At first glance, they’re pretty similar. The WSS logo has been replaced with a “real” picture, but there’s still a banner, title area, quick launch, and content space. But look a little closer. The Site Actions menu has moved. No big deal there – lots of custom master pages move that around. But, the new placement is comparable to the Backstage/File menu in the new Office 2010 client applications, thus making it a “natural” place for users to look for “application”(site)-wide functions. This analogy becomes even more obvious when some of the other tabbed interface options start showing up. (You’ll see that later in the article.)

Where’s MySite?

Another subtle change is the “personal” section of the banner. In SharePoint 2007, you had separate entries for User ID, links, and a direct link to your “My” site.

All of these options are now accessed through the menu under your name. There is also no reference to My “Site”, rather it simply calls it your “Profile”.

I think the hope here, is that by de-emphasizing the “independent site” aspect of the profile and personal storage, while actually expanding its function (the new profile features could fill up several articles on their own), resistance to deployment in certain enterprises would be reduced.

Bread-Crumbling Navigation

Getting around from site to site, and from place to place within a site, has received a LOT of attention in SharePoint 2010. In many cases, this has meant “reimagining” the concept of a breadcrumb.

In the case of 2007 site navigation, a breadcrumb stretched across the top of the page content area:

For large site hierarchies, this could become unwieldy as it stretched across the page. For 2010, Microsoft replaced it with a folder icon in the tab banner, which produces an indented hierarchical view of your current location:

Going the other direction, in SharePoint 2007 lists and libraries selecting a view was accomplished by selecting it from a drop-down list on the toolbar.

In SharePoint 2010, there is no list toolbar. While you can drill into the ribbon and find the view settings, then select your view, that’s a lot of clicking. Fortunately, Microsoft has turned the title panel into an in-site breadcrumb. When looking at a list or library, the last item in that breadcrumb is the name of the current view. If you look carefully, you’ll notice that there is a “down triangle” arrow. That’s your hint that this element is actually a dropdown menu, where you’ll find all of your view selecting goodness.

Tied up with a Ribbon

Of course, the rest of the stuff that used to live on a list or library’s toolbar:

has been moved into the Library tab of the new ribbon interface:

By the same token, individual items that lived in an individual item’s dropdown:

have been moved into the Documents (or other appropriate item’s) tab:

Note: In this case, the individual item dropdown is still there as well.

Summary

Some folks say, “The more things change, the more they stay the same”. There have been a lot of changes in SharePoint 2010. While there are some things that have stayed the same, they are actually in the minority. In this article, I have gone over some of the many changes to “carry over” functionality you will find when moving from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010. There are many more than I could hope to address in a single posting. I hope, however, that this article has given you some ideas of where to look if you can’t find your favorite function where it used to be.

Author: Woody Windischman
Site: The Sanity Point

Woody Windischman is a technology consultant with over 20 years of experience in a variety of roles, providing a unique perspective which allows him to see problems holistically.

Since getting acquainted with Microsoft IIS and FrontPage in the mid 90’s, Woody has been deeply involved in the community – first having been awarded as a Microsoft SharePoint MVP from October 2005 through September of 2007, and then spending a year working directly with the SharePoint product team.

Professional Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007
Woodrow W. Windischman, Bryan Phillips, Asif Rehmani
ISBN: 978-0-470-28761-3