The SharePoint Document Library is probably one of the most heavily used features of the product. The ability to customize a document library, create different views into it, and surface it on a WSS or SPS page make this feature incredibly useful, but the "surfacing" UI part of the functionality leave a bit to be desired.
Within a document library, you may create folders, which themselves may contain folders – just like the structure of a hierarchical file system. Unfortunately, the default functionality provided by SharePoint only shows you the documents and folders at a single level; there is no separate but integrated view of the folder stucture, making discoverability and navigation tough on the user. It would be nice if we could get a document library to look similar to the user interface provided by Windows Explorer with a tree-view in one panel and list-view in another showing the contents of the folder selected in the tree-view.
You might at first think to switch your document library to "Explorer View," but this doesn’t get us very far. Take a look at Figure 1. This shows an example document library in the default "All Documents" view. Note the presence of both files and folders, but there is no clear way to tell where you are in the folder hierarchy. Figure 2 shows how this would look in a web part showing the "All Documents" view.
Perhaps switching to Explorer View will help. A glance a Figure 3 shows that this doesn’t get us very far. Although we have a view closer to Windows Explorer, we still don’t have the tree-view showing us folder structure. In fact, this view has a major flaw – note the presence of the Forms folder. This folder contains the aspx pages that run the user interface for viewing properties, editing properties, uploading documents, and so forth. If you have Administrator or Web Designer rights, you can delete this folder, which will obviously screw up your document library – the documents will still be there, but you won’t be able to use the document library any more.
So, the out-of-box functionality doesn’t get us where we want to be. Fortunately, there are several third-party vendors that have created web parts that implement what we want. Most of them are implemented as connected web parts, with one web part showing the folder structure, connected to a document library web part which shows the contents of the selected item. These work reasonably well, but none I’ve found is as nice as the Professional SharePoint Document Library Explorer. This web part shows a tree-view / list-view interface into a document library and provides a look and feel similar to Windows Explorer, even including drag and drop of document between folders. The standard client-side popup menus are supported on items, and the web part has several configurable options, including whether or not to display the tree-view, whether or not to display a breadcrumb, and specification of view to display.
I discovered this web part as part of doing research for a client proof-of-concept project, and we like it so much we are considering purchasing it for internal use.
Figure 1 – Document Library Standard "All Documents" View
Figure 2 – Document Library Standard Web Part
Figure 3 – Document Library in Explorer View
Figure 4 – Professional SharePoint Document Library Explorer
