Hi All,I currently work with a customer that have a site collection with sub sites, where they use a global structural navigation of the sub sites in two levels (with dropdown). I want them to take advantage of the new modern team sites, but I see different behaviors of the navigation concept. In one site collection the global navigation displays only one level, and the next level is displayed in the current navigation. In another site collection there is no global navigation at all. An yet a another one there is just the home link in the global navigation. In some site collections the links in the global navigation opens in a new tab an in another the link opens in the current window/tab. Because of this inconsistency I have to tell my customer to wait to see what's happening. What plans does Microsoft have for the navigation concept (global/current navigation)? Where do we configure the navigation? It does not look like it cares about what's configured in the Navigation settings (/_layouts/15/AreaNavigationSettings.aspx).

IMO, microsoft go ahead of itself trying to modernize, leaving out/skipping some foundational concepts that should be sharepoint 101 that are coming back to bite them. The new UI is great in theory, but in practice, I find it a pretty big mess so far. For us the pros havent outweighed the cons yet.Its probably easier if you are toward the beginning of your sharepoint journey to adopt the modern stuff, but if you are years into it, definitely more of a challenge.

I've been harping about navigation ever since the first previews came out for doc libs, it would be nice to have those big long threads back on yammerOn Peter's point: I would be nice to be able to "turn off" the sites for o365 groups, kinda hard to formally push o365 groups when it provisions all of these not ready / in flux modern sites.https://office365.uservoice.com/forums/286611-office-365-groups/suggestions/16619995-ability-to-control-which-office-365-services-are-a

I experience exactly the same behavior in my developer tenant. It seems like this happens when you inherit the global navigation from the parent site and have activated the publishing infrastructure site collection feature. As a workaround I have configured the global navigation on every site (just 4 sub sites), then it worked as expected. By configure a header with a hyperlink on the second level, you get the dropdown menu as well. I really hope Microsoft sees that the failing navigation in "modern" team sites is a critical bug, that needs to be fixed ASAP!

Well I'm glad I found this thread because I was pulling my hair out with all the modern pages, not just the Office 365 site. Our first problem was that global navigation entries (inherited through the entire tree) were duplicated so one got "Library Library Admin Admin" etc on the top bar - but only on modern Wiki pages. That bug appears to have now been fixed as the global navigation is now working as expected on modern Wiki pages. But my client has recently had to switch to using Office 365 groups as Microsoft have turned off new site mailboxes (lead balloon time) and I've just noticed that the global navigation menu is missing from Office 365 groups as shown below. And "Site settings" isn't there either. From a quick read of above, it appears the root global navigation settings isn't being inherited. I'm guessing because it's a completely different weird hidden site collection? Office 365 user interface experience does appear rather rushed! BTW - why is the standard Edge spell checker disabled in this editor?

Yes, I know. But the new UI is great, so I will not turn it of. :smileyhappy: I feel the end-users miss a lot of good functionality if we disable the modern UI. By the way, I think I found one way to add the top level of the global navigation to the modern UI. If you have activated the SP server publishing infrastructure feature, the moder UI still using the settings form the "Top Link Bar"-settings (/_layouts/15/topnav.aspx). If you in the Navigation-settings (/_layouts/15/AreaNavigationSettings.aspx) select Sort Automatically, the first level of the global navigation is copied to the top link bar settings.

Modern Team Site - Global navigation | Microsoft Community Hub

26 Replies

Peter Mcdermott
Iron Contributor
Jun 29, 2017
I'm a crossroads with this.

I've created a site for one workgroup, and several others would like the same site. They can't share the same information, so I have to duplicate my effort. I don't mind the work, but when I went to set one up today, I had to create a site as a modern site/group (that's okay) but since my pages use 'legacy' web parts, have to create wiki pages.

While I'm okay with the sidebar collapsable navigation, it doesn't carry over to the legacy wiki pages. (Those links cannot be collapsed).

In my use case, sales managers want to access information on 40 different products and be able to quickly navigate between then based on what the customer asks for. It must also be easy for end users to manage the navigation as they add additional products. Any ideas?
- Julie Sanders
  Copper Contributor
  Jun 29, 2017
  Peter - for this use case, could you use Document Set? Tagging could be used to browse the products.. sorry, kind of off topic, but just wanted to suggest.
Pieter Veenstra
MVP
Dec 12, 2016
The new team sites ( AKA Office 365 groups) are not production ready yet. So I wouldn't recommend them at the moment. They are only for first release.
- Christian Enghaug
  Copper Contributor
  Dec 13, 2016
  Yes, but when you create a new Team Site, and activate the SP Server publishing infrastructure feature, you suddenly has a new link in the current navigation to a modern page called "News". But the page is empty, because the tenant has not yet got the news web part. When you then try to add a new page, a modern page is created. This is all happening in a Standard Release tenant. So some of the new modern features seems to be in "production" already. And you already got the modern look of lists and libraries. It's not the best experience for end-user that the global navigation disappears. I think Microsoft should at least support the navigation option already available in SP, before rolling out the modern parts of team sites.
  - jcgonzalezmartin
    MVP
    Dec 13, 2016
    This is a known issue (the News link appearing and not working) and last Microsoft message in regards of it was that they were working on a fix to remove thes link. You are right, some of the features are in "production", but you can disable new UI using controls provided by Microsoft
- Brent Ellis
  Silver Contributor
  Dec 12, 2016
  I've been harping about navigation ever since the first previews came out for doc libs, it would be nice to have those big long threads back on yammer
  
  On Peter's point: I would be nice to be able to "turn off" the sites for o365 groups, kinda hard to formally push o365 groups when it provisions all of these not ready / in flux modern sites.
  
  https://office365.uservoice.com/forums/286611-office-365-groups/suggestions/16619995-ability-to-control-which-office-365-services-are-a
- jcgonzalezmartin
  MVP
  Dec 12, 2016
  And navigation is one of the missing pieces of the cake...Microsoft has done some improvements but there is still work to be done

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Modern Team Site - Global navigation

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