Design a security trimmed navigation in SharePoint Online

Design a security trimmed navigation in SharePoint Online

...or SharePoint 2013, SharePoint 2016, SharePoint 2010...you get the picture by now.

What users want...

Users want to navigate quickly to the required information...ow gods if this was the only thing they wanted. Let's asume we have a user that wants just that :-)

...users get!

When working with SharePoint you have to take the boundaries and limits into account. One of the biggest challanges with navigation in SharePoint is how to get information accross site collections? Your biggest asset here is the use of search. Search is able to look beyond site collection boundaries. Another mayor benefit is that it is security trimmed. This means that you only see what you are allowed to see.

For more information on security trimming in SharePoint read the following:
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn167721.aspx

This makes search one of the best candidates for navigation.

My Enterprise Search Center is up and running now what?

In order to really use search you can (or must?) plan your information architecture.

Let's say we have created a site collection:
- Projects

We have created 1 (for simplicity) content type called: Base with a single site column: Customer. Customer is of the type managed metadata.

When we create a new Project site we add a list with the content type Base. After that we add a record to the list, defining the Title and Customer.

We created the following structure:
/sites/projects/Project1 | Base.Customer:Contoso 
/sites/projects/Project2 | Base.Customer:Microsoft
/sites/projects/Project3 | Base.Customer:Contoso

Because we added records to the lists and thus the site columns Search creates crawled properties. When this is done we can create managed properties.

Let's say we created a managed property called: Customer.
We can now search for:
Customer:Contoso.
This should result in 2 hits Project1 and Project3.

You can use the above to create the following wireframe:


The recipe:
- 1 web part page
- 1 search refiner webpart
- 1 search results webpart

Configure the refiner webpart to be able to refine on Customer (division or status).
Configure the search result webpart with the following config:
path:https://<tenant>.sharepoint.com/sites/projects    (contentclass:STS_List) ContentType:Base

Hope you have fun with this!

For background reading

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Manage-the-search-schema-in-SharePoint-Online-d4fab46d-ba41-4c03-9d4c-32b5b33198b6#__toc351360841

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Manage-the-search-schema-in-SharePoint-Online-d4fab46d-ba41-4c03-9d4c-32b5b33198b6?ui=en-US&rs=en-US&ad=US

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Manually-request-crawling-and-re-indexing-of-a-site-a-library-or-a-list-9afa977d-39de-4321-b4ca-8c7c7e6d264e?ui=en-US&rs=en-US&ad=US

http://en.share-gate.com/blog/understand-sharepoint-crawled-and-managed-properties-for-search

Troubleshooting search in SharePoint Online.
https://blogs.perficient.com/microsoft/2014/11/troubleshooting-search-in-sharepoint-online-o365/

Think before you act

Think before you act

 

 

SharePoint is just an enabler. The people that use your precious intranet, collaboration or whatever solution are the ones you need to keep happy. Mostly they don't give a…great deal about the technology below, in this case: SharePoint.

 

They just need to do their job and preferably as fast as possible! 

That is one of the major reasons why you need to think before you act. Ask yourself:

• What are we trying to accomplish with this solution?
• Who will be using this solution?
• What is it that they need to do?

You need to be able to answer the questions above before even thinking about creating site collections, libraries or other objects. Please do! Plan for SharePoint 2013

 

Once you have the answers you will need to document them. Again Microsoft helps us by providing templates for documenting your solutions Planning worksheets. 

 

The planning worksheets help you build your logical architecture. Perhaps you already notice we are working from the business down! Please remember that we are building a solution for real people.

 

In my future posts we will be diving head first in the information architecture to find out that different persona's work with your solution, requiring their own specifics that need to be facilitated!

Usefull links:

Plan for SharePoint 2013

Planning worksheets

lPlan logical architectures

SharePoint in the Real World - Information Management - Analysis

Especially when dealing with content management need to know about INFORMATION.

Don't believe me, but believe the MCP's of the world and believe all those (big) technical driven implementations that failed.

You really need to know your information and how it is organized:

• What information will your intranet, DMS, BI solution, etc contain?
• Who will be using it and how?
• How do they access it (...and find)
• When do they need it

Microsoft set up some starter worksheets that WILL help:

• Windows Sharepoint services 3.0 
• SharePoint Server 2010
• SharePoint 2013

I suggest you use this information and implement in the mother of all enterprise applications: Excel (or even better in a database). Why?

[Sarcasme]

• Maybe you want to modify your information structure at some point… where within our 1.000 sites did we use this site column? ;-)
• What happens when we modify our taxonomy?

[/Sarcasme]

So again:

Analyse the information that you will put into your SharePoint environment. Write it down and publish it to the people involved.