Forum Discussion
Recommended IA / Approach for Modern Experience Sharepoint Intranet
I have a question on best practice / recommendations for implementing the navigation and design for a new modern experience Intranet.
We originally planned to develop a classic publishing site, with custom master pages and page layouts. This approach would give us full control to implement the custom branded design and UX (already completed).
However, we feel that the modern experience may be close enough to ready that we could get 75% there doing the entire Intranet in modern. We see the current limitations are around custom branding and navigation.
I'm interested in the group's thoughts on how we should structure the navigation and design in modern. It sounds like the recommended approach would start with having multiple site collections , combination of communication and team sites depending on need. The challenge we run into is having a consistent navigation and brand across the site collections (or even within a site collection) using the modern experience. We are considering creating a header and footer extension to deploy to the site collections to contain the navigation.
Any thoughts on how to approach navigation and branding with modern? Is modern close enough that we can go all in on the new experience, or should we do everyting as publishing? Without being able to customize a master page or page layout, the site will look pretty OTOB compared to what we are used to creating.
Thanks,
Brendon
12 Replies
- I would certainly be factoring in the new building block of Hub Sites in your approach. Whilst not a complete solution, Hub Sites will address even further some of the limitations you describe especially consistent navigation and branding. SharePoint Hub Sites will be rolled in the 1H2018. It’s worth looking out the SharePoint sessions from Ignite 2017 which explain the concept and design of Hub Sites and demos of how they may be deployed. Hope this helps!
Dave Feldman and I shared how we answered a lot of the same issues you are thinking about in our session at Ignite. And we've also shared our custom web parts that I think you will find helpful (yes, header and footer extensions). Happy to answer any specific questions too. Here's the link: Build a modern intranet: Real-world planning, information architecture, governance, and adoption (BRK2244)
SusanHanleyi can't get to this presentation anymore, the link won't work. Is there another location where I can find this content?
- Do you mean the Ignite presentation from 2017?
Susan,
This is great. I'm trying to setup the webparts and have a couple questions.
1. What should I use for "cdnBasePath"? Do I need to create a new document library and use that?
2. When I ran gulp it didn't create a "deploy" folder. Is it supposed to be created in the same folder as the solution? I'm running gulp from "C:\Sharepoint Extensions\sp-dev-solutions-master\solutions\LinksAndHandlebarsTemplate"
3. I don't see the modernBrand web part anywhere. Is that part of the same LinksAndHandlebarsTemplate?
I really appreciate your help!
Brendon
@david feldman: Can you help answer Brandon's questions?
Have you looked at SPFx Extensions?
Thanks Pieter. That's what we are thinking of using to inject a common header and footer across the site collections. I wanted to make sure that's the recommended appraoch.
