One of the complaints that often arise out of “SharePoint sprawl” is a lack of consistent navigation: users complain that they don’t know how to get to sites on SharePoint. An obvious fix to this would be to make a “global” navigation menu available to all sites in the farm. Unfortunately, in past versions of SharePoint, this isn’t as easy as it sounds: site collections do not share navigation items. There are various workarounds to this, from Infowise’s Enterprise Capacity Solution to custom site map providers to custom Visual Studio solutions.
Though it’s not the most elegant solution, SharePoint 2013 does provide the possibility of global site navigation out of the box.
To do this, we use a new feature of SharePoint called “Managed Navigation.” Managed Navigation uses the Managed Metadata Service [Term Sets] to generate navigation items for a site. There are a few quirks to this, so let’s go through setting up a simple global navigation structure on a site.
- In Central Administration, ensure that the “Managed Metadata Service” is running on the “Manage Services on Server” page.
- From the “Manage service applications” page, click on the “Manage Metadata Service” link, then click on the “Manage” button on the ribbon.
- Once the Term Store Management Tool opens, click on the drop down on the root of the “Managed Metadata Service” and click on “New Group.” Name the group “Navigation.”
- Create a new Term Set in the new group, following a similar method (click on the drop down for your new group, click on “New Term Set”). Name this “Navigation Source.”
- If desired, change the owner of the new term set (by default it is you; if you are managing as part of a group you can change to that group instead. Save your changes, then click on the “Intended Use” tab and make sure “Use this Term Set for Site Navigation” is selected while “Available for tagging” is not selected.
- Now create your terms. These will be the first level navigation items in your new menu. Click on the drop down for the “Navigation Source” and click on “Create Term.” Hint: You can create multiple navigation items at once by hitting
after each one. - For each of the navigation items created in step 6, make sure “Available for tagging” is UNselected on the general tab. Save your changes, then click on the “Navigation” tab. In the Navigation Node Section, click on the “Simple Link or Header” radio button and provide an URL to which this navigation item will navigate to (if desired – if you are looking into multi-level menus you can leave it blank; the item can still be a menu but won’t go anywhere when clicked). NOTE: You can also use the “Term-Driven Page with Friendly URLs” option. This choice requires that you have tagged the pages that you want on the menu with the proper terms so they show up. Save your changes.
- If you only need a single level of navigation, you are done. If you want multi-level navigation, repeat steps 6 and 7 for each sub heading that you want.
- Next, create a new Term Sets at the “Navigation” level, one for each location (i.e. site collection) that will use this navigation. Once again, make sure that the term sets are not available for tagging but used as a navigation term set.
- Click on the drop down menu for one of the new term sets, then choose the “Pin Term With Children” option. In the resulting dialog box, choose each of the items “Navigation Source” set that you’d previously created (you have to do it for each term). Repeat for each additional term set that you created in step 9.
(If you’re wondering why this step is necessary, it’s because SharePoint will only allow you to associate a term set with one site collection. Creating a new term set and “pinning” the navigation items to the new term set allows you to get past this restriction while ensuring that changes made to the navigation are propagated to sites that rely on the same navigation). - Go to the site collection that you would like to change the navigation for. Under the “Look & Feel” section select “Navigation” (if you do not see this link you may have to turn on the SharePoint Publishing feature for the site).
- Under either the Global Navigation (for top menu navigation) or Current Navigation (for left side navigation), choose the “Managed Navigation” option.
- In the “Managed Navigation: Term Set” page, find the term set that you created for this site collection, then click “OK.”
- Navigate back to the homepage for your site collection. You should now see the navigation setup you created.
- Repeat for any other site collection that needs this navigation.