Navigation control can increase the effectiveness of your SharePoint rollout in
providing a true collaboration feeling to your users. Navigation can either be data-driven
or read from portal Site Map. The respect for SharePoint security for UI security
trimming is automatically followed and implemented. Since it is either data-driven
(from a list) or from portal Site Map, it represents a minimum maintenance for the
administrators.
Navigation control can provide 3 types of navigation to the users
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Enhanced Global Navigation: Displayed in tree view, it is based on ASP 2.0 menu,
preferably reads from Site Map and displays the entire Site collection information
based on user security. Navigation can be customized to include Administration links,
skip some Lists or respect the quick launch settings. Menu can be customized to
match the company branding.
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Local Navigation: Data driven navigation (from menu lists) allows Administrators
to build the navigation specific to the site or site collection. SharePoint security
is respected and hence automatic UI trimming of this menu. Again build on ASP 2.0
menu, it can be customized to match the company branding. Menu is usually displayed
in tabs or cascading tabs.
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Go to Navigation: Allows users to jump to one of the parent sites within the current
site hierarchy. When the users hovers the mouse, all the parent sites are displayed
and users can navigate to these sites.
Navigation display
Navigation can be displayed either as Tree View or Menu Navigation.
Tree view
Enhanced global navigation displayed in Tree View, allows users to easily navigate
through SharePoint sites. Site Map or Lists are used as the data source for Tree
view with respect to full SharePoint security.
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Menu can be customized to include commonly used user actions like, creating new
tasks in the project management team site.
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Administrator menu options like creation of sub sites can be added to the Tree view.
Any sub site or parent site can be administered in this way from a single point.
Since SharePoint security is respected, the admin menu will be trimmed for users
with no access or rights.
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Option can be set to follow the ‘Quick Launch’ settings and automatically all the
links which do not appear in SharePoint Quick launch will be removed.
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Tree view is built on ASP 2.0 menu and hence customization can be introduced by
CSS to match the corporate branding. Themes concept can also be used for similar
look and feel across all the sites in a site collection.
Menu Navigation
Local Navigation (to a site or site collection) and ‘Go to Navigation’ can be represented
in tab, bar, cascading menu. This allows the Site designers to effectively use the
real estate space (typically in the default page), so that links necessary to access
various site features can be grouped together.
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Menu data is stored in a SharePoint list and hence menu can be managed easily. No
code is required to create and deploy the menu to any SharePoint site.
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Menu Navigation supports various types of implementations.
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Header menu navigation: As name suggests, this menu is designed to appear in all
the sites in a site collection. This will typically appear in the top left corner
of a Site. Since the scope of the menu is Global in nature, the menu can be changed
in one place and all the sites under the site collection will have the updated menu.
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Simple tabbed navigation: Similar to the look and feel of ‘My Sites’ interface,
the navigation can be represented in tabs which can be customized for look and feel.
The currently selected tabs can be shown in different color and appearance.
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Cascading tabbed navigation: Cascading menu can be implemented where the child menu
will be displayed when the users hover over the tab. The child menus can go any
level in depth. The data for the cascading menu is stored in a SharePoint list allowing
users to customize the menu easily. SharePoint security is respected and hence implements
automatic UI trimming. So users will not see the menu to which they do not have
access to.
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Go to navigation: Allows users to quickly navigate to all the parent objects from
the current location. For example if the user is viewing a list item, then this
navigation control will display the following links; parent list (which contains
the list item being viewed), site and all the parent sites. Hence in a single click,
users can navigate to any of the parent objects without knowing the actual site
hierarchies.