I am pleased to announce some updates on the plan and timeline for improving the Document Set experience in modern document libraries.
In January, we communicated a March delivery date for these improvements. We apologize for missing that date. We’re now planning on rolling out this change in May. We will be making the official announcement to the Message Center very soon with exact dates. Thank you all for your patience!
This change allows organizations to use the power of document sets to group related documents together with consistent metadata and structure without having to go back and forth between classic and modern experiences.
Document sets now look and feel like ordinary folders in modern libraries, and benefit from all the cool new features in modern. This means that users can drag and drop content to upload to document sets, link to content that lives outside the document set, pin files to the top of the document set, start flows on document set items, and define conditional formatting on document set items. It also means that the Document Set experience can be customized using SharePoint Framework Extensions, just like all other modern list views.
All the content management rules you can define on document set content types are still supported. No business processes were harmed in the making of this change! Document set metadata can be viewed and edited in the details pane while in a document set. Shared metadata specified in a document set content type continues to work as it always has; values inside shared columns will be copied to items inside the document set. Columns that are identified as Welcome page columns in the content type are sorted to the top of the details pane, so that users can find them easily. Content and structure rules specified in the document set content type are also supported, including the default content and default view settings.
Document set versioning functionality will appear under the context menu on document set items in the modern list view, include “Capture Version” and “Version History.” Other document set-specific actions from the Document Set ribbon are still there, but only in classic. Just like any other modern list view page, you can click “Return to classic SharePoint” in the lower left hand corner to go back the classic document set experience back.
The one caveat is that customized document set welcome pages are not supported in modern. This change will not affect document sets that use welcome pages that have been configured with custom HTML or web parts; those welcome pages will still be displayed in classic mode, as they are today.
