Benefiting from some SharePoint 2010 Goodness in MOSS 2007

Last week, I had a client asking me to configure the multiple file upload page of one of his colleague to be just like his, allowing multiple files or folder structures to be dragged and dropped onto the page directly to be uploaded onto the server. When questioned further about what exactly it was he meant by that, he sent me the following screenshot: 

Never, in my short SharePoint life, had I ever seen that interface inside of the SharePoint 2007 context. After doing some investigation, I realized that an Office ActiveX is what is driving the Multiple File Upload interface, so the reason why that user had a different interface had to be because of the version of Office he was using. The standard is still Office 2007 in our organization, and that’s the version the user had installed. However, that user also had Visio 2010 installed, therefore, he had the following folder on his computer:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office14\

Doing some research on the web, I was able to identify that the STSUPLD.dll is the library driving the Multiple File Upload Library. This dll was located directly at the root of the office14 folder on my client’s machine.

The next part of my troubleshooting was to check to see if my own corporate computer was re-acting the same. Browsing to the same folder as my client, I selected the Upload multiple Files option. Sure enough, I was presented with the same old boring SharePoint 2007 interface I had always seen:

Also, trying to find the Office14 folder turned out to be a no show on my computer. Things then started to become clear. If I wanted to get the new interface, I had to install one of the office 2010 client application on my machine. Since not everybody in my organization has a license for Visio, I decided to go ahead and installed SharePoint Designer 2010. I let the installation complete, closed my browser, re-opened it and went back to the Multiple File upload page, and there it was again, that new shiny Drag and Drop, 2010 looking interface. The advantage of this new interface is that it lets you upload a full folder structure. Assume you have one parent folder with three subfolders each containing one file, you can simply drag and drop the parent folder to have all of the files and subfolders uploaded at the same time. Using the old interface, one would have to browse within each of the three subfolders and select each file one at a time to execute the transfer, and frankly, drag and drop sounds more like 21^st century than this tree-like control we had in 2007.