One trick for working with your users is to put the tasks they need to complete right in front of them. The easier you can make things work for them, the better things will be for the adoption of the solution. Using SharePoint Designer 2013 you can easily help users by creating Quick Actions for them. These are basically shortcuts that allow them to quickly kick off a workflow or navigate to a specific page. Below is an example of a Quick Action that was added to the display view of an item:

Quick Actions

There are three actions that you can create within a quick action, including:

• Navigate to a Form (example:DispForm.aspx)
  
• Initiate a Workflow
  
• Navigate to a URL
  

These are the common actions that you can use for a quick action, but there are various locations where the Quick Action would appear.

• List Item Menu
  
  • This would be displayed on the list drop down item (when you select the item (…) ellipse )
    
• Display Form Ribbon
  
  • This would be displayed when you select the view properties page for the item.
    
• Edit Form Ribbon
  
  • This would be displayed when you select the edit properties page for the item.
    
• New Form Ribbon
  
  • This would be displayed when you select the New Item page.
    
• View Ribbon
  
  • This would be displayed on the Items ribbon of the list view. This would allow you to click the check mark next to an item in the full list (tabular view) and then select the quick action from the Ribbon.
    

Image & Rights Masking

When you create a quick action you can assign an Image to the Quick Action that will be displayed (provided the Master Page isn’t hiding it). You are allowed to upload a 32 x 32 or 16 x 16 image. The best way to do this is to upload the image to one of the site libraries and then just link to it. It is very important that you use an image with the exact measurements as any other size image will not load.

Rights masking is a way that you can display the action to only users that have the same role as the one you list. This is a way that you can hide the actions from people who can just read the site while still showing custom actions to the site administrators. For a list of all available masks you can check out this article from TechNet – http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.sharepoint.spbasepermissions.aspx

Examples & Ideas

This approach can really help you add something a little extra to your solution to help your users make the most of it! Here are some ideas for ways that you could utilize this approach:

• Provide a Link to a Page with Additional Detail on the View Item. This would allow users to select a button from the Ribbon if they needed additional information (and would help keep the display page cleaner).
  
• Provide a link to the most common workflows that users would need to start.
  
• Provide a link for workflows that only the admins could see. This would make things easier for them while at the same time not showing additional buttons for all the users.
  

I have seen this question a few times on the Office 365 forums:

• Magical Disappearing Web Parts + Cannot connect to web part error
  
• Stability of Web Parts
  

When I first saw the response, I was slightly confused because I had never seen that particular behavior before. I tried to recreate it, but I wasn’t able to. What I have no learned is that is because I click the save button and do it quite often in my process. Because of this, I had never run into the issue. During one of my sessions at #SPCTCDC I was trying to add a web part to the page and was amazed that it just disappeared. After the session I went back to look at what was happening and realized that I was running into the same issues that others were seeing. While I will make no claims in this blog post to tell you *why* this is happening, I will try to cover what is happening and how you can avoid it.

Recreating the Issue

To see this behavior, start with a wiki page. Add a web part to the page and immediately use the tool pane to edit the current view. When you save the change to the current view your web part will no longer be visible on the page.

Where did my Web Part Go?

So where did the web part go? Did it really just disappear? The answer to that is no, and here is the trick to find the web part. Open the url to the page and add ?contents=1 to the end of the url. Here is an example of the link for my site: http://team.contoso.com/SitePages/Home.aspx?contents=1 . When you do this a web part management page will load and will show you the web parts that are currently associated with the current page. You will notice that this page thinks that the announcements web part is open on the current page.

This means that if I went through the process of simply re-adding the web part then I would get another web part added to the page, this time though it would be called Announcements [2]. Based on the forum posts I linked to, this is a common scenario that people have run into.

How do I get it back?

There is a trick you can use to get your web part back. Select the checkbox next to the web part and click on the option to close the web part. This will place the web part in the closed web parts gallery and you will be able to re-add the web part to the site.

Once you close the web part it will be added to the Closed Web Parts gallery. The closed web parts gallery can be accessed by adding a new web part to the page. You will see it at the bottom of the menu (if you have any closed web parts on the page).

You can select and add this web part back to the page and it will add the web part that was lost when you were editing the settings:

I have seen some cases where the web part won’t re-add to the site properly. In these instances I needed to delete the web part (use the ?contents=1 trick and delete instead of close) and then re-add it to the page altogether.

How can I make this not happen?

So far the best thing I have come across that keeps this from happening is to add the web parts to the page and save the page before editing any of the web part settings. The save command seems to cause the web part to get added properly to the page and then allows me to make any changes that I need for configuring the web part. If you have run into this issue in the past it would be a good idea for you to take a few minutes and look at the different web parts that are currently associated with your page. If you have a lot of web parts that marked as open but not displaying on the page it would be good to take a few minutes and delete them from the page. If I find the technical reasons for why this is happening then I will be sure to update the post.

This is one of those topics that I feel gets overlooked a lot as we move forward with additional releases of SharePoint. If you happen to have been using SharePoint for years you probably have a good idea of the workflows available and what you can do with them, but if you are just getting started (like so many I talk to are) then it can be often times overwhelming. In this post I am going to provide a very high level overview of the workflows available how they all work together.

What is a Workflow?

The first thing is an understanding of what a workflow is and how it works within SharePoint. In the most basic terms in SharePoint a workflow is a way to route content to a library or a list, collect data from a user, create tasks for a user or to send notification to users. The workflows come in two flavors – configurable or custom. There are currently two different workflow engines available and visible within SharePoint – the SharePoint 2010 workflows and the SharePoint 2013 workflows. These are two different types of workflows with two different sets of actions and functionality. This means that there are some things you can do in one version of the workflow that you simply cannot do in the other. This is honestly where some of the confusion comes from in my opinion. The reason that both exist today is to help ensure that workflows you built in SharePoint 2010 are still compatible in SharePoint 2013.

There are several different kinds of workflow that you can create –

• List Workflow: These are associated with a single list and are started for each item in the list.
  
• Site Workflows: These are workflows that are not based on a specific list and can be found in Site Actions. An example of these would be “sending a weekly email reminder”.
  
• Reusable Workflows: These are workflows that are associated with a content type (think “Project Charter” or “Sales Report”) and can be configured to run on any content that is of that same content type.
  

In my experience, most workflows that the typical business power user creates are the List Workflows and are based on a specific process that can be clearly identified.

Configurable or Custom?

The next area that seems to cause some confusion is around the area of adding a workflow to a list or creating a custom workflow. In SharePoint 2010 workflows there are a collection of workflows that exists as templates that can be configured for lists. These workflows are common activities such as document approval or collecting comments. In 2013, these configurable workflows don’t exist so all of the workflows you build are custom workflows that you can build within SharePoint Designer. If you want to add one of these configurable workflows to your list you can do so through the Workflow settings option (ensure the workflows feature is activated).

2010 Workflows on a 2013 Site?

Yes, this is completely possible. In fact in many cases I have seen users purposely create a 2010 workflow because they are wanting to use a set a features that was only available within 2010 and not available at all in 2013. Whenever you create a new workflow in SharePoint 2013 you will be given the opportunity to select if you would like to build the workflow using the 2010 or the 2013 foundation.

Hopefully this very quick, high level post helps shed some light on the concept of workflows and helps you see the available options for out of the box workflows.

So fair warning, but this post is going to require a bit of code. No worries though, as you can use the text tools inside of SharePoint to build the html and then just copy the code. The idea is that we have a workflow that is sending an email and we want to add some formatting to the email. You do this by creating the workflow and then editing the advanced options for the email step.

Here is an example of our workflow steps:

In the Email step we would like to make sure that the email has some added styles. You do this by selecting the email step and then opening the Advanced Properties menu.

Within the Advanced Properties menu you can see that the body of the email is displayed in HTML. If you select the ellipse (…) then you will be able to open an HTML editor. One trick to create the html is to go to a SharePoint list and enter in the text that you want, formatted the way you want. Once you do that you can Edit the Source to get the HTML that was generated by your entry. You can then copy and paste that into the advanced properties.

Once you make these changes and publish the workflow your will see the new formatting as part of your workflow email messages.

One common task I have heard people want to do is to create a common navigation that can be used across multiple site collections. In previous versions of SharePoint this would be something that required a custom solution. Using the features within SharePoint 2013 though this can be done with no custom code.

First, you will need to create a Group within the Term Store. You may need to work with your site administrators to make sure that you can do this or to get them to assist you in creating it. Scope is important on this one as you will want to ensure you are creating it at a global level and not just within a single site collection. For my example I created a Group called Navigation.

Within this group I created a New Term Set called “Intranet”.

For this Term Set I set the intended use for Site Navigation.

From there I simply added the terms that I wanted to have displayed in my navigation. You could also configure additional navigation settings within the Navigation section of each term. For my example I just selected all the default options.

Once I have things the way that makes sense for my navigation, I will open the team site that I want to use the navigation. You will want to first make sure that publishing is enabled.

One that is enabled you can open the navigation settings and configure the navigation to use your term set.

Once you configure this, the navigation will be linked to the term store, which means changes in the term store will be visible in your navigation. This is a great way to provide consistency for your users across multiple site collections.

I have seen this question a few times on the Office 365 forums:

• Magical Disappearing Web Parts + Cannot connect to web part error
• Stability of Web Parts

When I first saw the response, I was slightly confused because I had never seen that particular behavior before. I tried to recreate it, but I wasn’t able to. What I have no learned is that is because I click the save button and do it quite often in my process. Because of this, I had never run into the issue. During one of my sessions at #SPCTCDC I was trying to add a web part to the page and was amazed that it just disappeared. After the session I went back to look at what was happening and realized that I was running into the same issues that others were seeing. While I will make no claims in this blog post to tell you *why* this is happening, I will try to cover what is happening and how you can avoid it.

Recreating the Issue

To see this behavior, start with a wiki page. Add a web part to the page and immediately use the tool pane to edit the current view. When you save the change to the current view your web part will no longer be visible on the page.

Where did my Web Part Go?

So where did the web part go? Did it really just disappear? The answer to that is no, and here is the trick to find the web part. Open the url to the page and add ?contents=1 to the end of the url. Here is an example of the link for my site: http://team.contoso.com/SitePages/Home.aspx?contents=1 . When you do this a web part management page will load and will show you the web parts that are currently associated with the current page. You will notice that this page thinks that the announcements web part is open on the current page.

This means that if I went through the process of simply re-adding the web part then I would get another web part added to the page, this time though it would be called Announcements [2]. Based on the forum posts I linked to, this is a common scenario that people have run into.

How do I get it back?

There is a trick you can use to get your web part back. Select the checkbox next to the web part and click on the option to close the web part. This will place the web part in the closed web parts gallery and you will be able to re-add the web part to the site.

Once you close the web part it will be added to the Closed Web Parts gallery. The closed web parts gallery can be accessed by adding a new web part to the page. You will see it at the bottom of the menu (if you have any closed web parts on the page).

You can select and add this web part back to the page and it will add the web part that was lost when you were editing the settings:

I have seen some cases where the web part won’t re-add to the site properly. In these instances I needed to delete the web part (use the ?contents=1 trick and delete instead of close) and then re-add it to the page altogether.

How can I make this not happen?

So far the best thing I have come across that keeps this from happening is to add the web parts to the page and save the page before editing any of the web part settings. The save command seems to cause the web part to get added properly to the page and then allows me to make any changes that I need for configuring the web part. If you have run into this issue in the past it would be a good idea for you to take a few minutes and look at the different web parts that are currently associated with your page. If you have a lot of web parts that marked as open but not displaying on the page it would be good to take a few minutes and delete them from the page. If I find the technical reasons for why this is happening then I will be sure to update the post.

One of the most common requests I get from users is the ability to create a weekly reminder notification that will remind users to complete an action. Using the SharePoint 2013 workflows this is a pretty easy requirement to meet since we now have access to looping.

To get started you will need to create a site workflow. For my example I am creating an initiation variable that allows the user to set an end date when they start the workflow. The workflow will send an email, pause for 7 days and then loop again. The first check in the loop is to determine if the date is less than the end date. By doing this we are able to set a reoccurring workflow that will repeatedly remind users of items.

Here are some screenshots to get you started.

Create a Site Workflow in SharePoint Designer

Create an Initiation Variable so the person who starts the workflow can select an end date.

Add the Workflow Actions (including the loop)

Our workflow first sets a variable (type date) to the current date. It then enters the loop and tests to see if the variable Today is less than the End Date (variable entered by workflow starter). If the condition is true it will send an email and then add 7 days to the variable and wait until the 7 days are up and then start the loop again.

The email is a pretty basic email and a screenshot of the design of it is included below.

Start the Workflow (from Site Contents)

Enter in the date that you would like the reminders to stop being sent.

Once this has been started, the users you selected in your workflow will get an email notification (as you configured in your workflow).

Additional Ideas

This post has an example of how you could send out a weekly reminder via email to a team, but there are multiple uses for this concept. Another common example would be if you wanted to create new tasks every week. So an example would be “we have a weekly set of tasks that need to be completed” – your workflow could create and assign those new tasks every week. Reminders are a huge part of our daily tasks and using these simple workflow techniques will help you really make the most of your business solutions!

SPC14 is going to be here before you know it! I wanted to take a few minutes and put together a quick post on my schedule and some of things I will be at during the conference. I also wanted to highlight a few of my personal goals for this conference. So often I head to a conference overwhelmed with all that has to get done or all that I have to soak in, so this year I decided to create a few goals to see if I could help myself to focus on getting the most out of it!

My Sessions

So to get started, here are the sessions I will be presenting at this year’s conference. This is actually a first for me! I have never presented at a Microsoft conference before 🙂 Laura and I have been working hard on our content I am pretty excited to share it with everyone!

SPC215: Tips & Tricks to make the most out of your SharePoint site and maximize adoption

• Date: Wednesday, March 5
• Time: 3:15 PM – 4:30 PM
• Venue: Marcello 4401-4506
• Info: View session details in full

This session is going to cover six areas that you can really impact your solutions by following some simple tips and tricks. We will be doing some demos of a Marketing team site that is used by a department to collaborate and share data. All of the stuff we are showing though would apply to other situations as well! This session will be a fast paced review of some really awesome things you can do with SharePoint that directly impact how well SharePoint is embraced by your users.

Women in Technology Lunch

• Date: Wednesday, March 5
• Time: 12:00 PM – 1:45 PM
• Venue: Delphino 4003-4104
• Info: View session details in full

I am beyond honored to get to be part of the first Women in Tech lunch at SPC! I get the wonderful honor of being able to sit on a panel with some great colleagues of mine! The format for this one is pretty simple! We will be conducting a panel discussion over lunch J We will start with some quick introductions and then we will have a guided conversation. I am so looking forward to this one!

SharePoint Power User Training

• Date: Thursday, March 6
• Time: 1:00 PM – 5:00 PM
• Venue: Room not specified
• Info: View session details in full

This session is a post-conference session where Laura and I will be creating a no-code solution that allows for users to submit suggestions for review. We have created a sample scenario that includes approval routings, email notifications and much more! If you attend this session you will leave with information on how you can combine the many features within SharePoint to build one complete solution. These longer sessions are always a blast and I am sure the questions will be flowing since it is the last session of the conference! I guess if you want to go out with a bang and end on a high note then you should come to our session! 🙂

My Can’t Miss Sessions

In addition to my sessions – here are some sessions I wanted to highlight. I will likely be attending each of these sessions so if you see me there be sure to stop and chat for a few!

• SPC14 Keynote: Connect. Reimagine. Transform.

• SPC348 – Update on InfoPath and SharePoint Forms – This is a must see for anyone who works with InfoPath!

• SPC120 – Executive audience keynote | The dynamic future of work

• SPC318 – Client-Side Rendering (CSR) demystified – For anyone who is wondering what to do since SPD design view is gone. Be warned – it involves syntax and semicolons!

• SPC100 – Beyond Deployment: How IT Can Inspire, Motivate And Drive Sustainable Adoption

• SPC277 – Lessons learned from a support engineer: where there was no planning, there was no adoption

• SPC107 – Overcoming barriers to achieve social business success and adoption

There are so many more sessions I can highlight! There is so much good content that will be presented during the conference that it is impossible to want to attend most of them. Good thing the recordings will be available post conference!

Events I Plan on Attending

In addition to sessions you can catch me at most of the events. I have listed the ones below that I will be attending for sure.

• Welcome Reception (Sunday Night)

• Attendee Party (Tuesday Night)

• Ask the Experts (Wednesday Night)

My Goals

And finally….to wrap up this post, here are my goals for the conference. I hope that each of you is taking the time to think through what goals you have at this conference. It is one small way that you can make the most of it!

• Network! –

  • I can’t say this one enough, but I want to meet as many new people as I can and connect with them on common levels of interest. It is a great place to learn what others are doing, to learn about new opportunities and to identify key areas that you can contribute to the community.

• Provide 1:1 Help to the community –

  • I love traveling to events where I can sit down at lunch and just start talking with those around me. I also love where it breaks into a mini consulting session. I am looking forward to this happening a few times at SPC14! That means if you see me you need to stop me and ask me questions J

• Start a Sub-Community Group – Non Developers UNITE! 🙂

  • This one is another one that is near to my heart as I have a strong dislike for Syntax and Semicolons. I mean at the end of the day, they have their place….but really…I don’t need em! At SPC I will be handing out some stickers and promoting a new group of people that are really focused on truly out of the box solutions. Things that can be done from the browser by pointing and clicking and configuration and not requiring any type of development. Now this is all in good fun, because I really do know a lot of great developers….in fact I recently married one J At the end of the day I want to be able to help push information to the community that I work with the most. So by signing the pledge you are really just signing up to get some additional content from me post SPC. To sign up just head over to http://sharepoint.rackspace.com/spc and click on the link to sign the pledge (PS – none of this will be live until SPC). As a teaser – here is the early design of the logo we have 🙂 Hope you like it!

     

SPC14 is going to be here before you know it! I wanted to take a few minutes and put together a quick post on my schedule and some of things I will be at during the conference. I also wanted to highlight a few of my personal goals for this conference. So often I head to a conference overwhelmed with all that has to get done or all that I have to soak in, so this year I decided to create a few goals to see if I could help myself to focus on getting the most out of it!

My Sessions

So to get started, here are the sessions I will be presenting at this year’s conference. This is actually a first for me! I have never presented at a Microsoft conference before  Laura and I have been working hard on our content I am pretty excited to share it with everyone!

SPC215: Tips & Tricks to make the most out of your SharePoint site and maximize adoption

• Date: Wednesday, March 5
  
• Time: 3:15 PM – 4:30 PM
  
• Venue: Marcello 4401-4506
  
• Info: View session details in full
  

This session is going to cover six areas that you can really impact your solutions by following some simple tips and tricks. We will be doing some demos of a Marketing team site that is used by a department to collaborate and share data. All of the stuff we are showing though would apply to other situations as well! This session will be a fast paced review of some really awesome things you can do with SharePoint that directly impact how well SharePoint is embraced by your users.

Women in Technology Lunch

• Date: Wednesday, March 5
  
• Time: 12:00 PM – 1:45 PM
  
• Venue: Delphino 4003-4104
  
• Info: View session details in full
  

I am beyond honored to get to be part of the first Women in Tech lunch at SPC! I get the wonderful honor of being able to sit on a panel with some great colleagues of mine! The format for this one is pretty simple! We will be conducting a panel discussion over lunch  We will start with some quick introductions and then we will have a guided conversation. I am so looking forward to this one!

SharePoint Power User Training

• Date: Thursday, March 6
  
• Time: 1:00 PM – 5:00 PM
  
• Venue: Room not specified
  
• Info: View session details in full
  

This session is a post-conference session where Laura and I will be creating a no-code solution that allows for users to submit suggestions for review. We have created a sample scenario that includes approval routings, email notifications and much more! If you attend this session you will leave with information on how you can combine the many features within SharePoint to build one complete solution. These longer sessions are always a blast and I am sure the questions will be flowing since it is the last session of the conference! I guess if you want to go out with a bang and end on a high note then you should come to our session! 

My Can’t Miss Sessions

In addition to my sessions – here are some sessions I wanted to highlight. I will likely be attending each of these sessions so if you see me there be sure to stop and chat for a few!

• SPC14 Keynote: Connect. Reimagine. Transform.
  
• SPC348 – Update on InfoPath and SharePoint Forms – This is a must see for anyone who works with InfoPath!
  
• SPC120 – Executive audience keynote | The dynamic future of work
  
• SPC318 – Client-Side Rendering (CSR) demystified – For anyone who is wondering what to do since SPD design view is gone. Be warned – it involves syntax and semicolons!
  
• SPC100 – Beyond Deployment: How IT Can Inspire, Motivate And Drive Sustainable Adoption
  
• SPC277 – Lessons learned from a support engineer: where there was no planning, there was no adoption
  
• SPC107 – Overcoming barriers to achieve social business success and adoption
  

There are so many more sessions I can highlight! There is so much good content that will be presented during the conference that it is impossible to want to attend most of them. Good thing the recordings will be available post conference!

Events I Plan on Attending

In addition to sessions you can catch me at most of the events. I have listed the ones below that I will be attending for sure.

• Welcome Reception (Sunday Night)
  
• Attendee Party (Tuesday Night)
  
• Ask the Experts (Wednesday Night)
  

My Goals

And finally….to wrap up this post, here are my goals for the conference. I hope that each of you is taking the time to think through what goals you have at this conference. It is one small way that you can make the most of it!

• Network! –
  
  • I can’t say this one enough, but I want to meet as many new people as I can and connect with them on common levels of interest. It is a great place to learn what others are doing, to learn about new opportunities and to identify key areas that you can contribute to the community.
    
• Provide 1:1 Help to the community –
  
  • I love traveling to events where I can sit down at lunch and just start talking with those around me. I also love where it breaks into a mini consulting session. I am looking forward to this happening a few times at SPC14! That means if you see me you need to stop me and ask me questions 
    
• Start a Sub-Community Group – Non Developers UNITE! 
  
  • This one is another one that is near to my heart as I have a strong dislike for Syntax and Semicolons. I mean at the end of the day, they have their place….but really…I don’t need em! At SPC I will be handing out some stickers and promoting a new group of people that are really focused on truly out of the box solutions. Things that can be done from the browser by pointing and clicking and configuration and not requiring any type of development. Now this is all in good fun, because I really do know a lot of great developers….in fact I recently married one  At the end of the day I want to be able to help push information to the community that I work with the most. So by signing the pledge you are really just signing up to get some additional content from me post SPC. To sign up just head over to http://sharepoint.rackspace.com/spc and click on the link to sign the pledge (PS – none of this will be live until SPC). As a teaser – here is the early design of the logo we have  Hope you like it!
    

Navigation can be one of those tricky things that takes a bit of planning to get figured out. In this post I am going to cover a few things that are in place to help you provide a great experience for your users. Navigation is one of those things that is so important to your users so be sure that above all things you are thinking about them as you develop your approach. Keep it simple, keep it clean and easy to follow. Remember that you can have the best solution ever but users must use it for it to be successful. If a user gets easily lost moving through your solution or can’t find what they expect then you are going to have a hard time getting them to use the solution.

Seattle vs Olso

If you have spent much time in the “change the look” area of SharePoint you have likely seen the Site Layout option.

This option allows you to pick a specific layout for your site. The default layout option is Seattle and provides your site with a “Global Navigation / Top Bar” and a “Quick Launch / Current Site” side navigation.

The Oslo option provides a second option for displaying navigation. When selected, the Current Navigation is displayed in the location of the Global Navigation and the Global Navigation is hidden. This is a great tool to use when you are interested in having only one set of navigation and would prefer to have more whitespace on your site to display content.

This second layout option of Oslo provides a great way to give your users more content and should be used when you don’t need to have a second layer of navigation. Both options have benefits of use, so I encourage you to simply pick the one that works best in the scenario that is driving your business solution.

Updating Team Site Navigation

Updating the links that are displayed within your navigation is a pretty easy task. If you are working with a Team Site (one without the Publishing features activated) then you will have a slightly different experience with the navigation settings. You will be able to update the links directly on the page (using the Edit links option) or you can use the Top Link and Quick Launch options within Site Settings.

If you would like additional settings, you can always go into Site Settings and use the settings page for Top Link or for Quick Launch to add and re-order links.

The options for managing navigation on a team site are pretty basic and there are limitations with what can be configured. If you find that you run into limitations, then you can always activate the publishing features to allow for the site to take advantage of some advanced navigation options.

Publishing Navigation

If you would like to use the advanced navigation options on your site you will need to either create your site using a Publishing template or activate the features within your team site. The feature you will want to activate is the Publishing Infrastructure Site Collection Feature.

Activate Publishing Feature for the Site Collection

Once this has been activated you will see a Navigation link in the Look and Feel section of the Site Settings page.

When you click on the Navigation settings link you will be able to have much more granular control over the site navigation. You can set the navigation to build itself automatically based on the pages and sites created within the site collection, you can manually add the links or you can point to a Managed Metadata Term Store (see below).

In most cases I am a fan of building it manually. I do this because I want to make sure that my navigation is consistent and only changes by design. This is really personal preference, so I am sure there are some business cases where it makes sense to build it based on site content.

Managed Metadata Navigation

If you have the need to use a common Navigation set across multiple site collections then you could take advantage of the Managed Metadata settings. This would allow you to create a term store that has all the navigation items you need that would be referenced in other site collections. If you need to update links you would simple update the term store and the changes would push down to all Site Collections that are referencing your term set.

Step 1: Create a Term Store

To create the term store you would need to be assigned create permissions. If you are not an administrator then you will need to work with your organizations administrators to create this. In most cases, there will be a set of governance guidelines that are associated with this type of thing. For the sake of this example, we are going to assume that the term store has already been created. If you don’t have one created and need to get help with those steps, just follow the information in this link: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn194310.aspx Below is a screenshot of the term store that we will be linking to for our site collection navigation.

Step 2: Reference the Term Store in Your Site Collection

Once your term store has been created, you just need to reference it in the Navigation settings for the site collection.

Once this has been configured, your site collection navigation will match the values in the term store. If you need to update the navigation, simply open the term store and make the changes there.

Promoted Links

Promoted Links are the final area of navigation that will be discussed in this blog. Promoted Links come from a custom list type that is new with SharePoint 2013. It allows you to create a list of Links with associated images that are displayed in a Tile format. A common example of the use of promoted links is the “Getting Started” toolbar that is displayed on new sites.

What most people don’t know is that you can create your own list using this same template and add whatever custom links you want. You just need to create a new app based on the list template and then populate it with your values.

These lists are a great way to streamline navigation to key areas or links that your users should be accessing. For many of the solutions I have built there are several different lists based on this template. The best part of all is that this list is just a standard SharePoint list, so items can easily be security trimmed. This means it is easy to display tiles to one group of users but not another.