SharePoint’s Document Library Dropdown Menu

And the Joined Teams Feature That Should Have Been Available Sooner

Sometimes Microsoft releases a feature that is so obviously useful that you wonder why it never existed earlier. SharePoint’s document library dropdown menu is in this category. The unfortunate thing is that the feature has arrived too late.

Announced in MC301473 (updated February 3, Microsoft 365 Roadmap item 81990), the dropdown menu is generally available. When a site contains multiple document libraries. You see a dropdown menu to navigate between the different libraries. Take the example in Figure 1. We’re positioned in the default Documents library, but the site has four other document libraries. The dropdown menu makes it very easy to navigate from one library to another.

Will People Use the Document Library Dropdown Menu?

Despite the dropdown menu being generally available, my guess is that many people will never use the menu. This feeling is based on the experience that most SharePoint Online sites created today are linked to Teams and only have the default document library. Although the dropdown menu is available in these sites, it’s not very useful (Figure 2). It would be better if SharePoint Online hid the menu in these sites.

The other thing is that if a large proportion of SharePoint activity is via Teams, people don’t ever go near the browser interface and therefore won’t see the document library dropdown. MC301473  says that Microsoft is planning work to bring the dropdown to Teams, probably with an update to the Files channel tab. They haven’t shared a date for this work, but when it is delivered, Teams users will be able to switch between the available document libraries in a team-enabled site.

Teams Admin Center Shows User-Joined Teams

The Teams feature announced in MC332869 (February 15, Microsoft 365 roadmap item 87969) is another example of something that should have been in a product a long time ago. In this case, the message center notification tells us that the Teams admin center can now show the list of teams a user account is part of (Figure 3).

This is welcome news because there are many examples where tenants have written their own reports to list what teams (or Microsoft 365 groups) people belong to (here’s my version of a PowerShell script to create such a report). In fact, some like the idea of being able to print off the membership of a specific group or team (so here’s a script to do that job).

My point is that the necessary support to list the set of groups or teams a user belongs to has been around in the Graph transitiveMemberOf query for quite a while. Shown below is a simple code example which uses the Get-MgUser and Invoke-MgGraphRequest cmdlets from the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK to retrieve the set of groups a user belongs to. A filter extracts the set of teams, which we can then list. In the Teams admin center implementation, the code uses the team identifier to fetch details like its privacy, active state, and so on for display.

$User = Get-MgUser -UserId James.Ryan@office365itpros.com
$Uri = "https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/users/" + $User.Id + "/transitiveMemberOf"
[array]$UserGroups = Invoke-MgGraphRequest -Uri $Uri -Method Get
[array]$UserTeams = $UserGroups.Value | ? {$_.resourceProvisioningOptions -eq "Team"}

$UserTeams | ForEach{Write-Host $_.Id, $_.DisplayName}
34d68904-9d7c-4ef7-b715-eed283e80243 Industry News
c055da06-f21d-4381-9c51-f5a239d36329 Plastic Production (Team)
204e3211-4d07-4fde-95f9-227a8827742d Organization Planning (Team)
18aa8f1b-3bdf-41f7-b14b-a3be217478e8 Baden Workers
5348781d-52a8-490f-b75b-a72e702114d1 PL Test

In any case, the feature is now rolled out and available in your closest Teams admin center.

Fit and Finish Features

Microsoft will likely say that they work on features in priority order and items like a document library dropdown menu are not high on that list. That’s true, and it’s unfortunate when features show up long after they would have been useful.

Small but important features like the document library dropdown menu and revealing the set of teams someone belongs to are fit and finish items. No one will decide to use SharePoint Online or Teams because these features exist, but current users of these products will like that they do.

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