Organize your SharePoint sites with megamenu navigation and new “change the look” options
Published Jan 30 2019 09:19 AM 142K Views
Microsoft

It is time to further organize your modern intranet – building with SharePoint and Microsoft 365 – to enhance employee engagement and change the look of your sites so they work for you. Sites (portals) help bring together people and information that reflect your organization. It’s about getting things done – finding where you need to go—with effective navigation and common page elements.

 

“Megamenu and header layouts will make sites more appealing to groups that have diverse needs for pages and site navigation. It will really make my life easier in many ways as a solution architect for my company. While it's a look and feel update, these are the features that the end users really notice and makes a big impact.” – verbatim cloud admin feedback sent to Microsoft in reply to the corresponding message center post.

 

Site owners can now use:

  • Megamenus to better organize and showcase their site’s navigation items.
  • Updated “Change the look” edit pane consolidates all modern site look & feel options.
  • Site headers allow adjustment of layout options, logo and background choices.
  • Site footers allow logo, text and links to be added to the bottom of pages.
  • Site settings > Site designs to view any applied site designs and apply additional ones.

 

We will first begin rolling out these new “change the look” features in February 2019 to Office 365 customers that have opted into the Targeted Release program. And then in March 2019, we will begin roll out to Office 365 customers on Standard Release, followed by rolling out to our sovereign data centers (like Office 365 for government (known as GCC)).

 

Let’s dive into the details and screenshots of each new and updated “change the look” options – all important additions for site owners to configure a more-engaging SharePoint site – a more modern intranet.

 

Organize your site navigation with SharePoint megamenus

The most effective SharePoint sites (and web sites in general) help visitors find what they need quickly so that they can use the information they find to make decisions, learn about what is going on, access the tools they need, or engage with colleagues to help solve a problem. Even when search is available, most visitors start their web experiences by navigating.

 

Now you can change the navigation style to increase the value of your site navigation. The new Megamenu options allow for multiple levels of hierarchy at once - no cascading fly-outs needed. This will enable you to better organize and showcase the content and sites. And of course, for sites that don’t need the megamenu look and feel, you can still use the Cascading option. You simply go into the Change the look edit pane, click on Navigation and choose between Megamenu and Cascading. You then add and adjust your navigation items inline as you had before – now with a new megatastic look if you choose.

 

The new SharePoint mega-menu helps organize your site navigation.The new SharePoint mega-menu helps organize your site navigation.

Navigation should always be planned from the perspective of the user of information – the visitors to your site. And why not present them with a beautiful, organized megamenu. Note: the megamenu navigation layout is only available for horizontally oriented navigations and allows for a panel display of links up to three levels.

 

Learn how to customize the navigation on your SharePoint site. And review the Microsoft guidance on planning navigation for the modern SharePoint intranet.

 

Updated Change the look edit pane gives access to control site structure

We have consolidated several look & feel site settings into an updated Change the look edit pane – including where you go to turn on the megamenu option. The Change the look edit pane provides access to site settings for theming, header, navigation and footer options.

 

The updated Change the look panel gives you easier access to adjust site theme, navigation, header and footer configuration.The updated Change the look panel gives you easier access to adjust site theme, navigation, header and footer configuration.

Adjust the header of your sites

Site owners control the header portion of a site with a few simple configuration choices. First, they choose between two layout options: standard and compact. Second, choose a site logo. And third, modern site headers support backgrounds to make it easier to see the distinct header section and adds visual variety at the top of the site; you’ll see four distinct background options.

 

Site owners control the header portion of a site by choosing its header layout, logo and background.Site owners control the header portion of a site by choosing its header layout, logo and background.

Adjust the footer of your sites

When site owners change the look of their site, they can now add a site footer to showcase common information at the bottom of your site - like a logo, text and hyperlinks. If site owners choose not to use a logo image file, they can still add text that will appear on the bottom left. Text with links will appear on the bottom right.

 

Add a logo, text and hyperlinks to the footer of your site.Add a logo, text and hyperlinks to the footer of your site.

Note: configuring the footer is only available in pages and news articles in SharePoint communication sites. It will not appear at the bottom of SharePoint lists or document libraries within these same communication sites, and it will not available in SharePoint team sites. You will also be able to turn off footers from the “Change the look” panel after this feature rolls out to you. When this feature rolls out, all existing communication sites will get a basic site footer. If you want to turn off the footer control before its rolled out to you, please follow these instructions to turn off footer using PowerShell.

 

Learn more how to adjust the look of your SharePoint site footer. Learn more how you can “change the look” of your SharePoint site in Office 365.

 

New site designs panel for site owners

We are providing a new site setting to view any applied Site designs and apply additional ones - from within the sites themselves. The new site setting option is for site owners to display a new site design information panel. If any site designs have been published to the tenant, they will be displayed in the picker. Only site owners and site collection administrators have access to invoke this panel – and it respects any additional scopes on the published site designs, so only those available to the viewer will be displayed. If any sites designs have been applied to the site, they will also be displayed and can be selected to view what changes were applied.

 

The Site designs site settings pane allows site owners to view any applied site designs and apply additional ones.The Site designs site settings pane allows site owners to view any applied site designs and apply additional ones.

Learn more about working with SharePoint site design and site scripts.

 

Try more and more of what SharePoint offers, and let us know what you think

Build your modern intranet on SharePoint in Office 365 and get the benefits of investing in business outcomes – reducing IT and development costs, increasing business speed and agility, and up-leveling the dynamic and welcoming nature of your intranet.

 

In all, we encourage you to build out and organize your sites, your intranet – the way you want them to be consumed in context of your content. As you progress year over year, keep creating and sharing structured, easy-to-navigate experiences to your audience.

 

We want to empower you and every person on your team to achieve more. Let us know what you need next. We are always open to feedback via UserVoice and continued dialog in the SharePoint community in the Microsoft Tech Community —and we always have an eye on tweets to @SharePoint. Let us know.

 

—Mark Kashman, senior product manager for the SharePoint team

 

FAQs

Q: When is this all being released in Office 365?

A: Our goal is to release all the items to Targeted Release customers in Office 365 by the end of February 2019, with release to all Office 365 productions customers by the end of March 2019.

 

Q: Is this the same set of features Office 365 cloud admins were notified about via the message center – two message center posts: MC165552 and MC 172503?

A: Yes. Microsoft first sent MC165552 (“Updated feature: we're rolling out new SharePoint Online site branding and navigation features), and then we paused roll out. Recently, we sent the follow up MC172503 (“Updated Feature: New site branding and mega menu navigation features are rolling out”) to indicate that we were moving forward to release this set of features.

116 Comments
Steel Contributor

Hey @Mark Kashman , I have a few questions about mega-menus (not in my tenants yet so cannot test).

  • Do these menus support multi-language (yes, I'm the one always asking)? 
  • Can we use them at hub level or just site collections?

Keep shipping, we like the constant evolution.

Brass Contributor
Hi Mark, Confused why the footer will only be displaying on content and news article pages and not list and library pages. Seems to me that the ONLY people asking for a footer are larger enterprises and they are going to want (read demand) the footer on all sites as its part of their branding experience. Is there a plan moving forward to extend the footer to all pages in a site collection? Also one huge feature of the collab and portal footers in the SP-Starter-Kit is the ability for users to add personal links and have them accessible from these footers. Another wishlist item from enterprise. Is this something that is going to be added to the OOTB footer? Cheers, Dave
Brass Contributor

@Mark Kashman 

Thanks for the detailed info.

Megamenu items will be any link we can add in the navigation ? How it is build?


@Mark Kashman wrote:

It is time to further organize your modern intranet – building with SharePoint and Microsoft 365 – to enhance employee engagement and change the look of your sites so they work for you. Sites (portals) help bring together people and information that reflect your organization. It’s about getting things done – finding where you need to go—with effective navigation and common page elements.

 

Iron Contributor

So we have to run that powershell command on every site collection ? 

Why not a toogle button so you can set it for all sites in the tenant?

 

I want to disable the footer everywhere because I'm using a better one from the PnP community.

 

Brass Contributor

Are there any plans for the megamenu/footer feature to come to SharePoint Server 2019 on premise?

Brass Contributor

I am so incredibly excited about the updates arriving in our tenant. Thank you Mark, and your team, for making it easier for me to sell SharePoint online as a viable content management system to my leadership and content owners. The plan is to move our intranet to SharePoint online in 2019. Fingers crossed! 

Steel Contributor

We need to quickly get the option to convert the root site (tenant.sharepoint.com) as a communication so we can get the footer and full width section. I have a hard time understanding why the footer option can't be available in team site...

 

I hate to tell my customers that I can't use the root site for their main communication site when they want full width section and footer....

 

When will we get this conversion option?

Brass Contributor

Thanks but The footer should be available for all types of sites, not just only for the communication sites..

Copper Contributor

@Mark Kashman : it's a good job, but it does not enough
- Add option to remove completely header and a option to remove Hubsite bar
- Add option to use Taxonomy (terms store) for navigation
- Add a button to switch language

For moment, i have a dual scroll bar on my all pages ?!

Brass Contributor

@Martin Coupal - I think you are best to make a dummy page on your old root site, then in a script editor add a redirect script, save the page them make that page the new homepage of your root site so that it always redirects to your new comms site home site.

 

Check this thread - https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/SharePoint-Developer/Convert-Classic-root-site-to-Communicati... with the script below.

 

=================================

<script>
var wikiInEditMode = document.forms[MSOWebPartPageFormName]._wikiPageMode.value;
if (wikiInEditMode == "Edit")
{
// wiki page is in edit mode
}
else
{
// wiki page is not in edit mode
location.href = 'NEW SITE URL';
}
</script>

===========================================

Steel Contributor

@Richard Burdes , thanks for the suggestion but it still leaves the root site collection floating around. The root site must be the main entry site. I think we should not have to perform a redirection to bypass this shortcoming. 

Brass Contributor

My SharePoint Online still not having these options yet, why?

 

thanks

From Peter (System Architect, Quantr Limited, http://www.quantr.hk)

Copper Contributor

@Peter Cheung "Our goal is to release all the items to Targeted Release customers in Office 365 by the end of February 2019"

Copper Contributor

Hi,

we have just switched the mega menu feature on in our sharepoint site collection. However the mega menu which is being created looks rather awkward and not as nicely styled as as in the screenshot shown above. What are we doing wrong?

 

Best regards,
Oliver

Steel Contributor

@Oliver_Schneeberger , just in case, you need 3 levels of menu items to get this presentation.

 

Mega ConfigMega ConfigMegaMega

Copper Contributor

@Martin Coupal : Thanks! I was unaware that I needed a third layer! Now it's clear! Thank you!

Iron Contributor

I'm trying to change the top links in my hub navigation to Headers but it doesnt get saved, they are still URLs. Anyone else having this issue?

I'm also having two scrolls bars to the right after I activated the footer and it doesnt go away even when I deactivate the footer.

Steel Contributor

Hey @Mark Kashman 

 

This post of yours and the updates that have hit our dev tenant, shows only two header layouts - Standard and Compact. But, I remember that during the Ignite sessions and elsewhere, it was demoed that 4 (four) options would be there. Is that still in the pipeline, or it is now only two options? The compact doesn't do much, it just shaves off a few pixels. We are more interested in the "ultra-compact" option so to say.

 

Iron Contributor

@Abhimanyu SinghTotally aggree.
We are also interested in the "ultra-compact" option.

 

 

Steel Contributor

Very recently I started playing with the idea if of having our global navigation on the footer.  Why?

  1. It frees up valuable space at the top
  2. For many organizations/designs, the footer ends up being mostly repeated info from the top navigation.
  3. My thought that perhaps people's cursor end up gravitating towards the bottom of the page in day-to-day browsing

Wouldn't you know it, in the test group, the footer navigation was a massive hit.  People love it!  So of course, we have a footer in Communication Sites but not Team Sites..... and of course, same with the Mega-menu.  

I just don't understand............

 

Returning to a Communications site in our tenant today I now see there is a new bit of text in the Footer.

 

Powered by SharePoint communication sites. Click here to create your own.

 

This text is extraordinarily misplaced.  This is ADVERTISING that we do not need, and adds ugly text and "noise" to the page. This is not the place for people to create new Comms sites.  It would be really helpful if you would reconsider this default text.  @Mark Kashman 

Steel Contributor

Absolutely @Kevin Crossman. Any advertising (subtle or otherwise) is a definite no no on a professional and enterprise work environment. It's intrusive and pathetic. If we need to sell something to our users, "we" will do it. If we need to drive adoption, "we" will drive it. Why @Mark Kashman is Microsoft doing this? 

 

I am already highly irritated by the "feedback" tab on the bottom of modern sites! Our users think they are giving feedback to us, and then when they enquire about their queries, we have no clue of when and what did they post a feedback to us!

Iron Contributor

@Kevin CrossmanTotally agree!
Why is the footer not disabled by default?

 

@Abhimanyu Singh 

You can disable the feedback button in your tenant.

I think it's this:  Set-SPOTenant -UserVoiceForFeedbackEnabled $false

You might need to wait some hours to be effectief in the whole tenant.

 

 

 

Steel Contributor

Thanks @Denis Tiri for that piece. I never knew if that could even be an option! Yet, this is even more covert and I don't expect myself to keep digging docs and elsewhere to disable trinkets which pops up every now and then (don't know what was the thinking). Gotten hold of this obscure option in the docs here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/sharepoint-online/set-spotenant?view=sharepoint-p...

 

However, this doesn't really work. The issue reported is still open and not yet resolved: https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/office-docs-powershell/issues/508

 

Iron Contributor

@Abhimanyu SinghThat's too bad.

All I can say is that it works in my tenant.

(I think I waited more than 24 hours for it to be effectieve though)

 

Steel Contributor

The feedback button disappears in MOST places with that code, not all, fyi, and it takes a bit.

 

My biggest complaint is the lack of uniformity throughout. A footer in one place, not in another, a different menu here vs. there, etc. It's not even so much the look as it is trying to have a common feature set. Modern is coming along nicely but it's clear that there are a lot of hands in the cookie jar.

 

And that kind of advertising - no place for it. They are trying that with Teams and now Comm sites and it has to go (without me adding custom css). I'm just not sure what the thought process is here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Copper Contributor

Hi @Mark Kashman  - great additions! Thank you! 

Any ideas how to change the color of the footer via themes? 

TIA

patrick

Copper Contributor

The footer functionality released is very broken. When changing the navigation within the footer, you are unable to remove navigation items, or reorder them. Within Internet Explorer, you are unable to edit them. Very surprised this made it past QA testing.

 

What is the best route to report issues in first release features to Microsoft? After a week of having a ticket open with premier support, and being asked to submit business impact statement so the product team will look at the issue, it really feels like there must be some other way to report feedback quickly within first release tenants, otherwise what's the point of having them?

Steel Contributor

Wow! That was quick! Thank you so very much @Mark Kashman.

 

@Denis Tiri  and @Clint Lechner  MC173439 arrived in the message center today! - The SharePoint feedback button is being retired. Here is the extract:

 

We're making some changes to SharePoint Online. Starting 2/18/2019 we're retiring the product feedback button from the site footer of all SharePoint home and all modern site pages.
How does this impact me?
For SharePoint users to easily provide product feedback and suggestions we included a footer link to our UserVoice forums. As we've continued to update the SharePoint user experience, we want to ensure that the options to provide feedback to one's administrator or to Microsoft are clear. Starting in late February we will be removing the feedback button from the footer of SharePoint home and all modern site pages where it currently appears and instead providing options for feedback through the help menu.
What should I do to prepare for this change?
There is no action required. If you had previously enabled or disabled the button using the Set-SPOTenant -UserVoiceForFeedbackEnabled property this setting will no longer be required as the button will no longer be displayed for any tenant sites.
 
 
Yay!
 
 
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Not applicable

@Mark Kashman Can the mega menu be localized? E.g. can we configure different link titles (and probably links) for different user languages?

Steel Contributor

Just in case @DC Padur  doesn't monitor this forum. There is a need for localized megamenu. I agree that there are two levels of localization: Being able to enter text in the differents languages AND have different links per language.

Deleted
Not applicable

The megamenu display names can be localized. I just tested this. (Unfortunately the links cannot.)

Prerequisites:

  • you actually have the megamenu available (currently in Targeted Release)
  • you already added some menu entries and see the megamenu working

Now for the translation. Let's say you want to translate to German:

  • switch your "SharePoint language" to German (which can be complicated by itself...); the SharePoint UI should now display everything in German
  • edit the megamenu (click the edit link)
  • translate the menu entries (just overwrite them)
  • save

Now when somebody opens the site with a German language setting the megamenu will display the German entries. Repeat this for every language you want the megamenu to be localized for.

(This also works for external users by the way. For external users SharePoint uses the preferred language of the user's browser. In Chrome you can configure this in the Languages section of the settings.)

 

Copper Contributor

@Rasmus ÖsterholmI had the same problem. Looks like a bug.  Had to remove the menu item and create it again as a Header. 

Copper Contributor

Anyone know how to test this has made it to your tenant? I can't seem to see it yet on our intranet which is a communication site?..

When you click the gear in top right > Change the look. You'll have a bunch of sub menu's, including navigation, where you can specify megamenu or the old style. 

Copper Contributor

Hi, I got this problem w different theme's in SPO sites from the same tenant.
When I change from a site (CommunicationSite or TeamSite) to another the theme from the latest site remains?
When I then update the browser's page the correct theme occurs. It doesn't matter which browser I use (IE, Chrome, Edge, Firefox)

Anybody who's experienced this? Any suggestions how to correct it?
I'm about to present this new Intranet for a big customer and don't know what to answer them about this..

Steel Contributor

I have the same issue as @Rawmountain I thought the the default color was used but, now that I saw that it is the last site visited, I confirm that I have the same issue.

 

@Mark Kashman what is the best place to report that kind of bug?

Copper Contributor

Not only did you roll out the new Comms Site 'Footers' enabled by default (?!) with a 'create your own site!' call to action (YIKES!), but the Footer visibility reverts from disabled to enabled every morning seemingly automatically...

 

...The 'Move' and 'Remove' buttons for Footer links in the Edit menu are actually completely bugged and not selectable with a mouse or keyboard. Amazing. Saving Edits works maybe half the time?

 

Probably worse than this buggy mess of a Footer fiasco is that you seemingly gave ZERO consideration to how your new megamenu functionality would behave in the SharePoint mobile app... Does anyone test anything over there? :thinking_face: 🤦‍:male_sign: @Mark Kashman 

Iron Contributor

I have the same color issue. Theme of the previously visited site is used.

Only by F5/refresh or going to another page within the site the problem is fixed.

 

 

Steel Contributor

I'll be honest, this is one of the least successful rollouts I've seen. Comm Sites get all the Love here but more than anything, this fragmented feature set just makes for confusion and wow, people haaaaate this call to action and product hyping within SharePoint.  

 

How do I explain that the footer with custom links isn't available on classic pages or team sites?   One of the biggest pieces of the puzzle from our feedback is that saving links somewhere was needed. You can guess how that went over, when it was available on roughly 10% of sites.  

 

Really tough one here

Iron Contributor

We have our test tenant in targeted release and yesterday we had all the new "Change the look"-options. Today though its rolled back to the old where we can just set a theme and the footer is gone. Whats going on?

Steel Contributor

@Rasmus Österholm We are experiencing the same in our tenant. Even the dev tenant is having this problem. I was about to open a new thread on this, when I saw your comment.

 

@Mark Kashman What's happening?

 

Brass Contributor

@Rasmus Österholm & @Abhimanyu Singh We're seeing the same behavior in the tenants that have targeted release activated. All tenants are located within the EU-region. It worked yesterday evening (CET) but this morning the new functionality in the Change The Look menu was gone. The selected color for the site header is still visible but the footer, compact site header and mega-menu is gone. The Change The Look menu now only lets you change the SPOTheme.

Iron Contributor

I'm seeing the same in my dev tenant.

Also EU

 

Copper Contributor

Same thing in NA. Come on Microsoft, this has been a total mess from the beginning, but this is simply ridiculous now.

Steel Contributor

Wow, they rolled it ALL back............ small headers, megamenus, footer, all of it..... dang.  Guessing they said "back it up........ we're not there yet" - though I didn't expect the small headers to join the fray.  Must be tied in tightly.

 

Since these changes are in First Release, then they are doing exactly what they should and we shouldn't be complaining too much (albeit a little disappointed that compact headers are gone).

Steel Contributor

I wish they'd rolled back the new loading animation on lists and libraries while they're at it...

Iron Contributor

The not so funny thing is that yesterday we changed color of the navigation just to test it and now we cant change it back so it has the wrong color on our sites:

Capture.PNG

Confirming it's rolled back in our Targeted Release tenant also.

Steel Contributor

Very nice! Same thing here in Canada. No communication in the message center about this.... In the process of building an intranet with a customer (They are not using SharePoint in production right now so we decided to use first release). Now we are stopped... and who knows what's next... Microsoft needs to improve a lot regarding communication. Honestly I don't call support anymore everytime I see an issue (and most of the time it is never reported in the message center). I can't afford to waste my time about all those issues... 

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