My vision at Kaboodle Software is to develop a suite of high quality but affordable products that offer genuine business benefits to customers.

Last month, I proudly reported the release of K-Docs Approve, our first SharePoint Framework (SPFx) product into the Microsoft Marketplace and today, I am delighted to announce the public release of K-Docs View, our second-born child – and we are very proud parents indeed!

As with all our licensed products we adopt a Freemium model for K-Docs View. This means that you can simply download from our web site, or install it from the App Source – you don’t even need to register!

The Freemium version is fully functional. You only need to upgrade to become a license-paid customer if you want to unlock advanced features.

What is K-Docs View?

K-Docs View is an enhanced viewer web part for document libraries. Please visit the product page for more information or download the product support documentation for details on how to get up and running, and feel free to watch this 90 second product video.

Our rationale for building this product was born from what we saw as the inadequacies of the standard Microsoft toolset to deliver what organisations actually need, as detailed in this post The SharePoint Document Library Web Part – What is it good for!

The key benefits that K-Docs View has over the standard Library web part are:

• You can hook it up to any library in any site in you tenancy (with the standard web part you are constrained to using libraries in the same site)
• It is designed with read-only consumers in mind, so the UI is not encumbered with complex menus or busy toolbars etc.
• It provides a document “peek” function in a full sized panel which makes it useful to quickly check that you’ve found the right document (the small preview you get in the standard details panel is simply too small to be of any use whatsoever)
• It flattens the folder structure of the source library (if it uses folders) and uses metadata to quickly sort, filter and group documents. Metadata-driven navigation is back!
• Sorting, filtering and grouping can be achieved by a single click, making the web part incredibly simple to use.
• It provides a highlighted quick filtering textbox. Just start typing a key word, and see your results trimmed as you type – your users will love this!
• If the source library has Managed Metadata columns, you can use that to provide hierarchical filtering as described in my post at Hierarchical Filtering using K-Docs View.
• You can view documents in multiple ways and formats, including as cards, compact cards and in a standard table/grid. It allows documents to be viewed in our innovative document map mode, as described at D3 Virtual Tree Visualisations of SharePoint Document Libraries

Our customers think this is the coolest thing ever and we are trying to figure out how we might use this approach in other solutions – if you have any ideas that please do let me know at Contact Kaboodle.

In the family way

It is inevitable that some of our products are related to the same business function, and it therefore makes sense to group these into families. The first family we are working on is K-Docs and initially this will consist of 4 products as described in some detail in this post K-Docs Overview

The next one slated for release is K-Docs Publish. We are expecting this baby to arrive some time in December 2025. K-Docs Publish makes it easy to distribute documents from working areas to consumer-facing spaces in SharePoint. This solution is perfect for bulk publishing approved documents to an intranet and (optionally) converting them to PDF in the process. You can even transform Word documents into SharePoint Modern pages as an online knowledge base or wiki (this is the replacement for our hugely successful Word to Wiki solution which is now retired as it was built as SharePoint Add-in and so is no longer supported by Microsoft).

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