Navigation in Office 365 / Teamsites / Groups / Sharepoint Home -- Where is Microsoft leading us?

[Clint Lechner]

It seems that Microsoft wasn't looking at a global navigation plan when building out the various new products and features across Office 365.  When they rolled out the new document library experience, it was OUR feedback that brought a top level/global nav into the picture.  Modern Teamsites seem to be a similar experience (though I know there is a plan to bring a global navigation into the picture). 

With this in mind, I ask you all, is anyone out there building out Office 365 without a global navigation within Sharepoint?  Is the waffle/launcher and Sharepoint Home combination enough?  Do we even need some type of global navigation in Sharepoint to guide our users around?  

The evolution of Groups can surely cut down on at least part of the global navigation, possibly moving the need for "Departments" or "Projects" etc.

I'll be honest, one of the biggest hassles of an intranet is indeed the global navigation.  It's a very difficult task to build a taxonomy that everyone understands and also can easily be expanded for future growth.  I personally look forward to the day where one isn't needed.  So where ARE we headed?  What have others done?  If you could start over, without a global nav, could it be done?  Would you ditch it?  Just wanted to open it up and get some ideas, thoughts, and feedback from the community and maybe even Microsoft as well.  

[#2]

Really well written. I will be sharing this with our IT team.

[#3]

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?

[#4]

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?

[#5]

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

[#6]

The problem is that global navigation sure doesn't look like something that Microsoft was focused on for its modern experience.  Nothing in lists, libraries, pages, or the sharepoint front page, and not a word about the topic anywhere.  If you also take a look at their other products within Office 365, there's no similar global navigation anywhere, just the waffle.  All of that together would lead most people to believe a global navigation isn't something Microsoft is pushing people to use.  You can clearly see sites and groups everywhere and that seems to be how Microsoft envisions people move around from product to product (and it's a decent way too).  So even if they do put some type of global navigation in (yes, it's coming), does that really fit in their roadmap or is it put in because we have said "bring it back, we want it!!!"

[#7]

By the looks of the views in this thread, it is quite a popular topic. I too am looking to implement an "intranet" in office 365 and i too am struggling with the concept of no global navigation.
While I do agree that users generally go to a search page to look for something, there is yet another user habit to consider, and that is Organizational/Functional searching. 
Global navigation exists in many cases as a psudo organization chart that users can easily and visually relate to. Now as seasoned SharePoint admins we know that org charts and names change and functions for the most part change very littles, hence there will always be some sort of structure this way.

I guess i would call these types of navigations "crutches". 

One of the most common website/intranet scenarios i want to get to is the "amazon dream". A search driven site that has it all in the context of a search box. But even Amazong has crutches. They have a departmental structure that you can fall back on in if you get to deep into your searches. 

THis alone leads me to believe that a global navigational construct is still needed in a corporate intranet system, especially if you are a new employee, or a geographically disperesed company.

My thoughts are that the dream of a "navigationless" intranet is something to aspire to, BUT, current reality dictates otherwise in many traditional orgs. Start ups seems to have a different way of achieving this, but even startups grow up. So what do you do then?

As a company with no real anchor point on 365 we rely on what we can see and have immediate access to and work within those parameters, but without a way to logically navigate the "intranet roads", how do your users actually find what they are searching for, especially if they are exploring and or they do not know exactly what they are searching for?

Perhaps I answered my own question by alluding to search result sources as being the crutches we need, but perhaps there is better way to achieve this that i am not thinking about.
It is 2018 now, so what have you guys done while  waiting for Hubsites to drop?

Nando