Forum Discussion
Introducing a SharePoint app bar that features global navigation
Microsoft is introducing a SharePoint app bar in SharePoint online that will feature global navigation in your SharePoint modern communication and team sites.
The SharePoint app bar brings a consistent navigation experience to every site on your intranet, featuring quick access to important sites across the organization with global navigation, personally relevant sites, news feed and the files.
Enabling and customizing global navigation in SharePoint requires a home site.
Read more about:
- SharePoint app bar experience
- Key Highlights
- Impact of SharePoint app bar on page customizations
- How to disable the SharePoint app bar?
- How to enable the SharePoint app bar?
- Release Timeline
Link to article: Introducing a SharePoint app bar that features global navigation
You can disable the SharePoint app bar temporarily using PowerShell until October 31, 2021.
To run the PowerShell commands you will need either Global administrator or SharePoint administrator privileges. Follow below steps:
- Download the latest version of SharePoint online PowerShell
- Then, run the following command with administrator privileges:
Set-SPOTemporarilyDisableAppBar $true
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- Jens SkovCopper ContributorI have had a home site set up for some time (and it shown up as an icon in the SP app), but I still do not have to Global navigation option under settings.
Appbar is not disabled.
Does anyone have an idea why?- Mary F HarveyIron ContributorWe have a demo tenant and a dev tenant and the bar has not shown up in either even though they are marked as "early release". But it has shown up in our production tenant. I find that very odd that the "first release" tenants do NOT have it yet.
- Mary F HarveyIron Contributor@Jens - a quick update - I submitted a ticket to see if there was a tenant issue, and MSFT responded that according to the roadmap, this feature is still in development. Once it gets to the fully launched stage, then we can worry about it not being available in a given tenant.
- Irene_Lappalainen225Brass ContributorThis is now visible to some users in European Standard Release tenant. We have multiple users in Targeted Release mode, some are able to see this and some not. I am the admin who would like to configure this before launch and my account is in Targeted Release mode, but still I am not able to see this. Are anyone else experiencing this?
Microsoft started releasing this feature recently to targeted release tenants. It is not rolled out completely and may take some time (took up to 24 hours for some users) to work properly on your tenant after it starts appearing on SharePoint sites.
I think you have to wait until it shows up for you on your tenant or you can raise a support ticket with Microsoft from admin center.
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- KevinBryanCopper ContributorThis showed up in my tenant on 3/9 for user accounts but not for the global admin or SharePoint admin accounts. It's been more than 48 hours and still no admin accessibility which is a little frustrating as I'd like to get this configured.
Meh.. MS strikes again..
- nlundqvistBrass ContributorWe are in the same situation. Targeted release but still not visible 😞
- mattchowellIron ContributorHow do we turn this off? It's visually distracting, unnecessary and hasn't been approved by my company yet.
- PhilineVonSteel ContributorAs in the article above
How to disable the SharePoint app bar?
You cannot disable the SharePoint app bar permanently. However, you can temporarily disable the SharePoint app bar in your tenant using PowerShell until October 31, 2021.
To temporarily disable the SharePoint app bar:
Download the latest version of SharePoint Online PowerShell.
Then, run the following command with administrator privileges:
Set-SPOTemporarilyDisableAppBar $true- Guilleni2050Copper ContributorThe Set-SPOTemporarilyDisableAppBar $true is not working
- lance-augheyIron ContributorJust another whacked out "feature" that annoys and destroys a good product for SMALL business. You know, the ones who don't have employees all over the planet. Global navigation...for an organization that has one SharePoint site. USELESS.
- Hasse EdqvistBrass Contributor
lance-aughey AFAIK Global navigation is dependant on the existence of a Home Site. if you dont designate any site as Home Site the Global Navigation bar doesnt show up. If anyone knows different, please let us know.
- mattchowellIron Contributor
Hasse Edqvist No home site designated here and it showed up. I assume it will appear for everyone, and if there's no home site you get the awful SP home page mess instead.
- Clint LechnerSteel ContributorI find the negative comments surprising. Global navigation that spans all sites has been a huge ask since modern arrived. Because of the header and other possible info on the top of the page, a left-hand nav sytem like the appbar is a very good design decision. If you look around at other Office 365 products you'll see that type of navigation everywhere already (Teams, admin.microsoft.com, Outlook actually minimizes that way, Planner, etc).
What I do have an issue with is not being able to turn off Sites/News/etc. There is information there that not all tenants use, and if it's blank or we don't want all our sites readily available, well, we're out of luck now unless I want to use some SPFX magic.- lance-augheyIron Contributor
Clint Lechner I cannot speak for others, but my comments, however one chooses to view them, have less to do with the introduction and advancement of "features" and more to do with Microsoft's inability to recognize their one-size fits all approach is flawed. I'm not arguing that the introduction, existence and use of this nav bar is pointless for one, some or many. My concerns run much deeper than this.
I struggle to understand/comprehend how or why any entity providing a service to its customer base considers it an acceptable practice to introduce something NEW in an "on" or "active" state and, feature depending, provide no, one or multiple ways of de-activating it, temporarily or permanently, for those who deem it unneeded, unnecessary or those who may want/need a little more time to understand and/or determine its relevancy and how its integration into their portfolio will affect other aspects of the environment (I.e., customizations). It's as if engineers at Microsoft have a dartboard "of choices" in which to offer the subscriber - and we are forced to accept whatever the outcome is. I've stated in many other posts, if you can dream up a way to make it happen, consideration must be given to make it not happen.
Additionally, this mention of "temporary" causes me further concern -- what is coming our way (in October) that we should prepare ourselves for? What will Microsoft wow us with then? I'm sure we'll find out a week or two out. I've marked this in my calendar (because I hate surprises).
For those environments with dedicated resources directed at monitoring, reviewing and vetting any/all Microsoft service introductions, changes, etc., this may be "no big deal", we'll just inject some custom code into the platform to hide, disable, etc. Let's not forget this fluffy Microsoft cloud was originally crafted for those little companies needing the same technology (functions) as the big companies...security, storage, email, chat, etc., and yet all Microsoft seems to focus on now is the larger entities wanting boundless and endless navigation, sharing and collaboration -- and the fluff that goes along with it...most of which is USELESS and UNNECESSARY for the many small, single facility, departments of "one" (IT, HR, etc.), companies that exist today.
Lastly, all one has to do is pay a visit to the many UserVoice sites that Microsoft identifies for each of their services and it's clear their emphasis is placed upon annoying little "features" (nav bar) instead of critical "functions" (PDF integration).
- mattchowellIron Contributor
lance-augheyMsft always does what they think is "best" regardless of user opinions. If they understood anything about basic ux, they'd know that something as visually obtrusive as this app bar, HAS to come with an "off" switch.
- Hasse EdqvistBrass ContributorI´d argue it WAS a good design decision before Edge suddelny got vertical tabs too. now that just looks silly and is very confusing. 2 bars side by side on the left. what were they thinking?
- David SlightIron Contributor
David Slight No, you are not missing anything. This is the how it is currently.
I have noticed this too in one of my site. SharePoint app bar does not change with theme change but the inner global navigation changes with theme selection. Here's how it looks on my site:
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- Craig StanleyBrass ContributorHello - Can i ask a question about the availability of this within the iOS SharePoint app. Will this be available at some point?
- jfranzBrass ContributorI both love and hate this feature at the same time. For my intranet portal this is perfect, I would barely have to do much to get this how I want it.
However we have built another portal for our volunteers (10,000) the base of which are not tech savvy by any means so we have spent considerable time and money customizing a few site collections to work like an application. The volunteers see nothing but giant buttons and can't click away from the site. They would also have NO business accessing our intranet portal or any other section we have setup. So for this "app" I would love the ability to turn off the app bar all together.
We also have project sites that are totally separate from the other two sections I mentioned and also would not have the same navigation or be connected to our intranet portal. So for this section I would love the ability to keep the power bar but customize the global nav.
We need the ability to customize it a bit more or turn it off where needed so I am not left scrambling to try and figure out the best work around for our volunteer section. I have turned it off in our live tenant and am working on testing it out in our dev tenant for now.- mattchowellIron ContributorI've turned it "off" globally - because it's too intrusive for something of such limited value - by using our custom stylesheet injected with an SPFx extension. You could try that option and target the sites you want to hide it on.
- jfranzBrass ContributorYeah I think this is the way to go. I already have this on another site where I wanted to hide things via css. It's such a pain to have to go around something that was already working for us smoothly. Thanks for the suggestion Matt.
- AGoneauBrass ContributorPlease rethink adding "Lists" to the SharePoint App Bar unless it can be a choice whether to show it. We have many lists in our company that people interact with via a PowerApp or an approval Flow, but they don't ever need to see the actual list. Why would we want them to? Exposing recently visited lists so readily is inviting trouble and confusion for non-power users.
- Benjamin BennettBrass ContributorThis is a very good point. In addition to approval flows and other "behind the scenes" uses, we've added a variety of lists that are used to display a filtered subset of cards on a Home Site page. People don't need to be directed to view these full lists, as that could cause confusion.
Perhaps there could be a property of a list (particularly in SharePoint, less of a concern for personal lists) to hide it from feeds and such other than to populate web parts on published pages. So long as they can be found in Site Contents, we can still direct those who need access to find the lists without requiring a direct URL.
- PhilineVonSteel ContributorCurrently looking into replacing our homepage (which is a page in a modern Team Site, with lots of subsites) to a comms page, to accommodate the new global navigation.
As described here https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/modernize-classic-team-site
Has anyone here had experience in doing this? What can go wrong? Does this just create a comms style page which I can set as homepage and nothing else in that site collection changes?
thanks