SharePoint 2010 at Work

Chapter 11. A Global Navigation Solution Across Site Collections

Peter Allen

Have you ever wanted an easier way to have global navigation that spans across site collections? SharePoint provides an elegant solution for global navigation within a site collection. However, when you architect a SharePoint instance to have multiple web apps and site collections, a global navigation system is not an easy solution to create. A global navigation system would need to be created on each site collection, and any changes to the global navigation need to be made in each and every site collection ...ouch!!! You would think there needs to be a better solution—and there is!

In this chapter, we will explore one possible solution that allows us to have the same global navigation across site collections and the ability to manage it from a central location.

The goal of this solution is to create a global navigation solution that will be capable of the following:

• Deploying once and centrally adding, editing, deleting, organizing, and managing tabs and their associated pull-down menus

• Controlling the order of tabs and the placement at the beginning or end of the Top Navigation bar

• Adding functionality to have pull-downs with our tabs (SharePoint 2010 Foundation does not provide this functionality)

• Allowing pull-down menu items to be pulled from a standard SharePoint Links list

• Ordering and grouping pull-down menu items

• Creating tabs or pull-down grouping headers can be links—or not

• Supporting themes for global ...