Structured navigation across all of Office 365 and apps - file explorer for SharePoint

[Allan With Sørensen]

Seems to me like a lot of focus, when it comes to finding stuff in SharePoint and OmeDrive is very much about my recent stuff, discovering stuff that I didn’t know that I needed or searching for stuff that I don’t remember the location of. But what about the stuff that I do know the location of? What if I want to have a hierarchical structure, that I can navigate through right down to the point where I want to go?

I am thinking about the people who are used to file explorer and that kind of navigation and now they’re asked to go to the “SharePoint Home” page, which is just not the same. Personally I don’t necessarily think like this, but we have many users who do and we’d like to see something that would address this kind of thinking.

To me it needs to permeate all the way through to any place where I might want to navigate my way to a given SharePoint site. Be it from the office.com start page, the “save as” dialog in Word or “save attachment” from Outlook Online. In each of those places we’d like to see a way to hierarchically navigate to a given SharePoint site, then document library, then folder. We basically need a file explorer for SharePoint. It should of course contain sites that I follow as well. It should be available in mobile apps, in new tabs in Edge and of course in the SharePoint app - and ultimately in file explorer itself.

It should even support ordering sites hierarchically, where those site are really separate site collections or perhaps belonging to Office 365 Groups ie. not structured in sites and subsites, but residing in a “flat” structure.

We can’t be the only ones who want to see this?

[#2]

Just to share our experience :)
We work in teams and each team needs both the same and different information. We went with the goal to have information ready for use with the least amount of clicks.
One document library was created for the shared information, classified by content type, customer, service, and tags.
Each team got their own library for team specific information.
Two pages where created for each team - one for the team itself showing the overview of information and most important, a list of customers, which opens a generic customer page (customer id in the URL).
The generic customer page shows all relevant information about the chosen customer, including the documents from the shared information document library. Additional filtering was possible for service, content type, and tags, allowing for quickly drilling down to the needed information.
Our viewpoint was that if you have to search for the information, then we have failed :)
Kind regards, John

[#3]

He all,

we had also this requirement for several customer project and since many years for SharePoint on premise and SharePoint Online/Office 365.

We developped a "search based global navigation for SharePoint/Office 365". With this navigation you can follow your sites, access your project sites, team sites or groups team or central manage a structured link list.

I joined a printscreen.

Come back to me if you need more information.

[#4]

OK, thanks! So you kept the information inside the same SharePoint Team Site?

That's not going to cut it for us, since we need to be able to define different access rights to different content.

[#5]

Thank you! That is an interesting way of approaching it. It looks promising. One thing though: it won't work from inside the Office applications, the front-page of Office 365, aso. But definitely an interesting start.

How do you define the categories of workspaces, project spaces, aso?

[#6]

no, we are working on multiple site collections. The navigation is only a piece of javascript. This javascript can be injected in all new site (user custom action web scoped).

[#7]

they are set on the property bag for each site collection. Search query can rollup this properties and group the search results per site type (Project, team or want you want)