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Navigation in Office 365 / Teamsites / Groups / Sharepoint Home -- Where is Microsoft leading us?
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.
- Really well written. I will be sharing this with our IT team.
Clint Lechner - "The problem is that it's very difficult for users to accept this type of "structure" initially" I think the bigger challenge is actually the discipline of 'adding' metadata. Unless you have a good policy and SP setup in place, this will just seem like extra work for the user which means there's a good possibility that they won't do it.
No doubt it's the better route though!Maybe you have experience in metadata policies in organsiations and how it was managed to ensure everybody plays their part?
Also, Global Navigation is only useful in a curated environment.
I remeber a presentation of General Motors (I think) at some previous sharepoint conference where they showed their SharePoint implementation. They've develeoped an application to deploy teamsites for their endusers.
Basically they had hundreds (or thounsands) of teamsites. You can't display that many sites in a Global Navigation.
What they did, was to script a page that listed all the sites, where people could lookup all the sites and request to join.
