Forum Discussion
Navigation in Office 365 / Teamsites / Groups / Sharepoint Home -- Where is Microsoft leading us?
It seems that Microsoft wasn't looking at a global navigation plan when building out the various new products and features across Office 365. When they rolled out the new document library experience, it was OUR feedback that brought a top level/global nav into the picture. Modern Teamsites seem to be a similar experience (though I know there is a plan to bring a global navigation into the picture).
With this in mind, I ask you all, is anyone out there building out Office 365 without a global navigation within Sharepoint? Is the waffle/launcher and Sharepoint Home combination enough? Do we even need some type of global navigation in Sharepoint to guide our users around?
The evolution of Groups can surely cut down on at least part of the global navigation, possibly moving the need for "Departments" or "Projects" etc.
I'll be honest, one of the biggest hassles of an intranet is indeed the global navigation. It's a very difficult task to build a taxonomy that everyone understands and also can easily be expanded for future growth. I personally look forward to the day where one isn't needed. So where ARE we headed? What have others done? If you could start over, without a global nav, could it be done? Would you ditch it? Just wanted to open it up and get some ideas, thoughts, and feedback from the community and maybe even Microsoft as well.
By the looks of the views in this thread, it is quite a popular topic. I too am looking to implement an "intranet" in office 365 and i too am struggling with the concept of no global navigation.
While I do agree that users generally go to a search page to look for something, there is yet another user habit to consider, and that is Organizational/Functional searching.
Global navigation exists in many cases as a psudo organization chart that users can easily and visually relate to. Now as seasoned SharePoint admins we know that org charts and names change and functions for the most part change very littles, hence there will always be some sort of structure this way.I guess i would call these types of navigations "crutches".
One of the most common website/intranet scenarios i want to get to is the "amazon dream". A search driven site that has it all in the context of a search box. But even Amazong has crutches. They have a departmental structure that you can fall back on in if you get to deep into your searches.
THis alone leads me to believe that a global navigational construct is still needed in a corporate intranet system, especially if you are a new employee, or a geographically disperesed company.
My thoughts are that the dream of a "navigationless" intranet is something to aspire to, BUT, current reality dictates otherwise in many traditional orgs. Start ups seems to have a different way of achieving this, but even startups grow up. So what do you do then?
As a company with no real anchor point on 365 we rely on what we can see and have immediate access to and work within those parameters, but without a way to logically navigate the "intranet roads", how do your users actually find what they are searching for, especially if they are exploring and or they do not know exactly what they are searching for?
Perhaps I answered my own question by alluding to search result sources as being the crutches we need, but perhaps there is better way to achieve this that i am not thinking about.
It is 2018 now, so what have you guys done while waiting for Hubsites to drop?Nando
It seems clear this is the direction MS wants customers to go in. I'd be "all in" on the new SharePoint page in O365 if the user's Followed Sites were more prominent. That should be much more prominent than currently seen. If it was me, I'd flip Followed and Recommended sites. The sites / updates from Followed sites should be the most important thing, but many times the Followed sites aren't also Frequent sites, so the Followed list is so easy to miss.
I'd like to see "Featured Links" be more prominent myself. It being the last/lowest section of links doesn't really make it "Featured" now does it? This is the one spot where we can actually add important links and customize the experience to fill the gap of not having a static navigational system anywhere.
I totally agree - I hope they change the order
Hi,
Very good topic and also a current one. I designed a new Intranet concept to one of my client after the future of Sharepoint event.
This client of my feels very strongly about the global navigation. We dicussed about the Office 365 and the way SharePoint is going to evolve.
After several sessions and long discussion we decided the following:
- no global navigation
- a form of "global navigation" will be in the SharePoint view by promoted sites
- All the navigation will be made via SharePoint view
- Follow suggestions guidelines are made my job role, to make adoption easier
-- > but this is just a starging point design. The design will be reviewed after all the new features are launched by the end of this year. Then we can actually see is if this really is the way to go plan - or is there still a way to make a traditional Intranet design.
During the discussions our major concern was the users. The concept is so different than any other site used before it will require a huge amount of internal support and guidance.
Also we identified that the information architecture has to be changed and re-designed after we know more about the new SharePoint Framework based pages.
This is how far I have gotten with this issue for now. It would be great to hear what others think about this matter.
Anna-Maria Kähkönen - could you elaborate a bit more on your solution? It's an interesting topic, but I fail to see how one could implement a solution without global navigation and without making the user experience a few more clicks away than usual. I'd be interested to hear how you're going to acheive this and the question is also whether or not it's worth it considering the potential user impact if they don't see what they would expect to see in terms of global navigation.
Well the idea is that the new SharePoint page will be the new landing page. From where user can navigate to different global navigation sections. See picture black 1.
When user is navigated to for examble site 1. The navigation to new sections will require the user to come back to sharepoint view - see picture black 2.
But this is just preliminary design. We need to wait after ignite to see, if this is the best possible option to do this. This approach requires us to rethink the whole site and the information structure. But to me - I think is best to try new things rather than try to force the old ideas to new system.
Curious how you are going to work without global navigation. when people need to go to a different site which is normally in the global nav. do they first need to go back to there SharePoint homepage?
Somehow it feels like extra clicking. maybe you can tell me more about the thoughts behind not using a global nav.
kr,
Paul
