I've gotten some questions lately about differences the end user will notice between MOSS 2007 and SharePoint 2010. The differences definitely go beyond the ribbon, although I'm taking that as my starting point. Read on for a sense of the user experience from one version to the other:
1. The Ribbon.
MOSS 2007: This is the toolbar for a document library, with Actions expanded:
Sharepoint 2010: Here's a section of the ribbon for a document library. Note there are two tabs, both packed with features.
2. View control
MOSS 2007: List or library view control is at the far right of the page:
SharePoint 2010: view control has been moved into the ribbon (see above ribbon screenshot), but is also actionable through the breadcrumb, which is a nice new feature:
3. Site Actions menu
MOSS 2007: far right of the page:
SharePoint 2010: Far left of the page (can you imagine the number of person-hours spent in discussions at Microsoft about this change?)
4. Breadcrumb / Portal Site Connection
MOSS 2007 has a linked breadcrumb navigation and a configurable connection to the home page of the portal at the top left of the page:
SharePoint 2010 moves the breadcrumb to the page title area, and adds a folder icon which can expand to show the complete path. My opinion: this folder is not the most intuitive thing for the first-time 2010 user to click.
5. Create Menu
MOSS 2007 - options for content that can be created are laid out in categories. I've gotten a lot of questions from users over the years about how to create a new site - the placement and name of the "Sites and Workspaces" option, and the fact that the types of sites a user can create are not exposed, is not the most intuitive setup.
SharePoint 2010: The menu is more graphical, and filterable by the kind of content the user wishes to create. My opinion: the fact that a content type is always selected by default is a big pain. When I'm moving quickly, I'll forget to de-select the default option and pick the one I want, and end up having to delete that list or library and re-create. That's user error to be sure, but I'm betting I'm not the only one who's encountering this, and it makes me wish that there wasn't one selected by default.
In addition, the fact that the user needs to click "More Options" to be able to, e.g. use the top link bar from the parent site when creating a site, means that there are going to be a lot of subsites created that don't display the global navigation by default.
6. List Item Forms for New / Edit / View
MOSS 2007: The form for creating, viewing or editing any list or library item opened in the page and caused the entire page to refresh:
SharePoint 2010: The new / edit / view form opens in a separate window, with its own ribbon, and the origin page is partially blacked-out behind it:
7. Page Editing - Adding a Web Part
MOSS 2007- when you edit the page and click Add a Web Part, the web parts menu appears in a popup window. Web parts are categorized by group, but the order in which they appear differs based on the underlying site content type, which can be confusing to the content owner of multiple sites.
SharePoint 2010: the Web Part menu appears within the page. Web parts are categorized in folders, which requires more clicks and some hunting around to find parts that are not frequently used. My opinion: For power users, importing / uploading a web part is a better AND worse experience: the upload menu is much more obvious and intuitive, but once you browse to your file and click the Upload button, the entire web part menu disappears, and you need to click Insert a Web Part again in order to see the new "Imported Web Parts" category.
8. Quick Launch
MOSS 2007: Colors and lines separate headers from links.
SharePoint 2010: Less grid, more flow. View All Site Content has moved to the bottom, and People and Groups is gone (my opinion: a good idea, because a fair number of my clients requested for this link to be removed from the site definition).
9. Calendar - adding a new item
MOSS 2007 - Difficult to represent in screenshots, but in Calendar view, when you double-click on the block for a day, nothing happens.
When you click on the bar above the block that contains the date number (blue for all days but Today, gold for Today), that day's view of the calendar is displayed.
SharePoint 2010 - Double-clicking on the block for a day opens the New item form - a definite improvement!
Clicking on the number bar over the block still takes you to the Day view, but it's harder to know that bar is there unless you hover over it.
This list is not (yet) comprehensive; I will be adding to it over time. Please feel free to comment and let me know what I've missed, what your likes and dislikes are about the usability differences, etc.!
