Recently, my colleage Pierre pointed me to this extension for Office 2007: UBitMenu.
It restores the classic menu structure of Office 2007 on top of the Office 2007 ribbon.
In the meantime, I got used to the ribbon navigation, it really has advantages, but sometimes it would be nice to have the previous menus if you can’t find a certain functionality you don’t use very often. Microsoft also offers the interactive command references to help you out.
As you have probably heard, SharePoint 2010 has a total new interface on the user side: it has the ribbon as we know it from Office 2007.
There are a couple of reasons why this can probably become an issue and will require extra training for your end users:
a lot of companies are still running Office 2003, and will probably hold on upgrading until Office 2010 is available. These people have never seen the ribbon before!
the ribbon is “security trimmed”, but where in MOSS 2007 any option that you did not have access to was hidden, it is grayed out in SP 2010. This gives some very strange results if you only have read access: you get a ribbon full of disabled buttons.
Some functions are less accessible than befor, e.g. the content types. It requires some extra clicks to get where you want.
Definitely something to consider when you start planning your end user training!
A lot of IT projects fail because users struggle with the change that the new tools bring them. As an IT implementer or trainer, it is good to “unlearn” everything you know about the software, and view it from a user perspective.
The video below shows that what is simple, is not always obvious!
