Managed Navigation in SharePoint 2013

In this article we can explore the new feature in SharePoint 2013 called Managed Navigation.

What Managed Navigation is

Managed Navigation enables the building of a navigation object (menu bar, side bar or such) for a publishing a site derived from the SharePoint managed metadata taxonomy.

Managed Navigation allows terms to be associated with a navigation item.

Advantages

The following are the advantages of Managed Navigation:

1. Multi-Level Navigation
2. Friendly URLs
3. Centrally Managed
4. Search friendly

Multi-level Navigation helps to build sub-menus in a publishing site.

Friendly URLs will look as in the following:

 

Central Management helps us to create/update/delete navigation items in one location, without any need to duplicate the changes. All the sites and sub sites will reflect the changes immediately.

Search friendly works with the search ability and discoverability of the content associated with a term. Tagging a page with a term and using a Search Web Part improves the search ability.

What a Managed Navigation item looks like

A page after configuration of a managed navigation looks as in the following.

 

How to perform Managed Navigation

The following are the steps needed to setup Managed Navigation.

Step 1: Enable Publishing Feature and Configure Managed Metadata Service

From Site Collection Features, ensure the Publishing feature is enabled.

 

Configure the Managed Metadata Service and Ensure the services are running correctly.

 

Step 2: Enable Managed Navigation

Open Site Settings then select the Managed Navigation link. Choose the Managed Navigation radio option.

 

From the third section, choose the Create Term Set option. Click the OK button to continue.

After doing that you can see that the top menu bar and the side link bar disappear.

 

Step 3: Create Terms

Now we can create the terms to be displayed in the navigation menu and quick launch area. Open the Site Settings then seelct Term Store Management. Expand the Site Collection item and choose Create Term.

 

Create hierarchical terms as in the following.

 

Step 4: Test Page

Refresh the home page. You can see the Menu bar with sub-levels inside it.

 

You can click on the menu items and it will throw an invalid page error, since we have not configured the navigation URLs. You can return to the Term Store & Set Navigation URLs for each term.

 

 

You need to create separate pages or sites to use the URL against Navigation.

References

Overview of managed navigation in SharePoint Server 2013

Summary

In this article we explored the Managed Navigation feature of SharePoint 2013.