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Navigation in Office 365 / Teamsites / Groups / Sharepoint Home -- Where is Microsoft leading us?
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.
How is your navigation going? How are people adapting? Has there been any other changes?
I'm curious if anyone else has started to focus less on global navigation and more on sites and trending sites/topics more?
Interesting topic indeed. With all this talk of SharePoint Home being the landing page of "the intranet", are we now suggesting a traditional Corporate Intranet could be a thing of the past? Surley there is still a need there?- Folks, be sure the team is thinking also about Global Navigation in the modern UI....but today there is nothing I can share with you in regards of this topic. Just stay tunned
Thanks Anna-Maria Kähkönen I see where you're going with this. Our current SharePoint implementation made use of Wikis alot before we started structuring data into subsites so our users are used to the global navigation.
I am affraid this (new) concept will disturb more than it will help. it is always good to rethink of things but also be aware of the extra clicks users have to do before they can move on.
I think they will not kill the global nav. or chage it. but maybe i am wrong here :-)
Kr,
Paul
Yes, I totally agree - more clicks it is not ideal design. The old way to go is in many way much better. But like said, this is just an early stage design and we most definetly are going to rethink this after we know more about what is coming and can be more sure which is a better way to go.
This is very interesting topic to hear other peoples ideas and concerns. Let's all come back to here after ignite, shall we :D
More food for thought here.
If you're looking for something, anything, what's the first thing you do? Google it, right? But what if you're looking at a search result and you need to go back and look at the other results? There's no global navigation is there? No. Somehow we get by just fine with this approach.
So..... SEARCH is king for finding what you're looking for. Combine search with an intelligent, user-community-activity aware application and you have the Sharepoint home page.
Now think about Delve. Delve is essentially the Sharepoint home page but with documents. Again, seems like we're moving away for from "structure" to a more free-form, "intelligence" driven approach to finding not just relavent data but now sites, people, etc.
The problem here is exactly like metadata vs. folders. There can be no doubt metadata is better. Search is better. It's more flexible and given the right framework, is FAR better than a static folder-driven hierarchy. The problem is that it's very difficult for users to accept this type of "structure" initially.
I think this really is where Microsoft is pushing us though. Look at how teamsites. Teamsites were the building blocks of sharepoint. Even in Sharepoint 2013, unless you turn on Publishing, there isn't a global navigation. When Microsoft pushed out their modern pieces (teamsites, document libraries, lists, etc), they didn't even put a global navigation on them. Ok, they did, but only when we said "where the heck is our global nav!!!!" It just doesn't seem like a traditional hierarchy is where they want to take us here.
