Many organizations are looking to use Microsoft SharePoint to replace their File Shares. The appeal of SharePoint is that it has native document management capabilities, such as versioning, retention and searching based on meta-data. However the out-of-the-box user interface to SharePoint has a number of weaknesses that make it frustrating for users who were previously saving and retrieving files to / from a network drive or other file share.

A key frustration with SharePoint is that it does not provide the familiar tree-view of the file store that was previously available through Windows Explorer, or through the File Open and Save dialogs of Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

Navigating the SharePoint Document Store

MacroView DMF Explorer displays an intuitive tree-view of your SharePoint environment so that you can visualise all the document libraries that you have permission to access. The MacroView DMF tree-view shows all available views of existing document libraries. The MacroView DMF tree-view makes browsing files in SharePoint document libraries feel familiar to someone who is used to working with Windows Explorer.

That tree-view is available directly from Windows and also from popular applications such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat. As a result, you no longer need to switch between the web browser and other applications as you save and retrieve your documents.

The MacroView DMF tree-view has a number of features that make it easy and efficient for the user to navigate large SharePoint document stores. See Working With Large SharePoint Document Stores In SharePoint.

Saving, Uploading & Moving Files

Users needing to save PDFs to SharePoint appreciate the way MacroView DMF supports saving PDFs direct from Adobe Reader or Adobe Acrobat. See MacroView PDF SharePoint Save for more details.

MacroView DMF makes it much easier to manage files once they are stored in SharePoint. For example MacroView DMF you can move files from one document library to another by drag and drop – MacroView DMF will preserve version history and respect meta-data. MacroView DMF also provides good support for file management tasks such as copying, deleting, renaming, copying, setting document level permissions, inspecting version history – even creating new libraries and folders.

MacroView DMF Explorer (part of MacroView DMF) allows you to take files offline, so that you can work on them while out-of-the-office, and on your return to automatically synchronise them back to their correct locations in SharePoint.

MacroView DMF is also a useful tool for migrating files from File Shares into a SharePoint-based document store. For more information see Migrating Files to SharePoint.