Getting back what was taken…

SharePoint 2010 is leaps and bounds better than any previous version in many ways. However, there are areas where some folks feel a little bit was lost in the translation. One of these areas was the ability to create a view of a document library that actually used Windows Explorer “behind the scenes” to let you perform drag and drop style file manipulation. For SharePoint 2010, the Explorer View was replaced with an icon in the Library toolbar to “Open with Explorer”. This opens your library in a separate window, using the full Windows Explorer.

Note: Depending on your window size, the labels for Outlook, Excel, and Explorer may not be displayed.

While there are a lot of reasons the Explorer View option for Web Parts was taken out, the desire for that feature is still going strong. Although it isn’t exactly the same, the following workaround will get you pretty close to the old Explorer View. This is accomplished through a venerable web part that has been a part of SharePoint since the very beginning – the Page Viewer. A page viewer, in essence, is an HTML IFrame that you control through the SharePoint interface. It is capable of displaying almost any content that you can point a browser at.

To add a page viewer, start by editing a SharePoint page. Either in a Wiki Content zone or a Web Part zone (depending on your page type), select Insert, and click the Web Part tool in the ribbon, as shown below:

Select the Page Viewer part from the Media and Content category, and click the Add button. In the web part’s context menu, select “Edit Web Part”. Change the view type to Folder, and enter the UNC path to the document library you want to view (e.g. \\shareppointserver\site\library), as shown here:

Click OK or Apply, and voila! You will now have an explorer window on your page, that points to your document library. You can Edit the properties to give it a more reasonable title, or to make it an appropriate size for the page at hand.

There are a couple of caveats when doing this, however. The biggest one being that you don’t want to use this function on an Internet Facing web site, or on a population with browsers other than Internet Explorer. The other thing is, like the original Explorer view, you can’t control the window settings your users may have. Thus each person may get a slightly different experience.

Still, if you miss the Explorer View of a document library for embedding in a page, this is the only way I have found to make it happen.