Understanding Navigation in SharePoint 2010

Understanding Navigation in SharePoint 2010

SharePoint 2010 has some different types of navigation that can be configured in a site collection. In this chart, we will discuss the out-of-the-box navigations.

In SharePoint environment, navigation provides the users with the tools they need to successfully locate the different areas within your site. When user accesses the SharePoint site, they will use the provided navigation to access the specified content they are looking for.

Several types of navigation are available within SharePoint, and some are available in cases of certain features activated, such as the SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure has been activated.

Following are the main navigation tools:

• Bread crumbs – These are links that provide users with information about their location within the site, relative to the rest of the site structure. By bread crumbs, user can easily navigate to a different place of the site. Using SharePoint Designer 2010 or Visual Studio 2010, you can configure the breadcrumb navigation control.
• Tree view -Tree View navigation appears on the left of each page in a site and displays site content, including sites, lists, libraries and folders.
• Quick Launch – Quick Launch is common displayed on the left of each page in the site, and it is used to highlight current site content. You can also customize Quick Launch navigation by using SharePoint Designer 2010 or Visual Studio 2010.
• Metadata navigation – This feature enables you to navigate through lists and libraries based on the managed metadata configuration. Metadata navigation is displayed only when a user views the list or library for which metadata navigation has been configured.
• Publishing site navigation – This navigation is available in publishing site, and it contains Global Navigation and current navigation settings. Also, you can configure the navigation order.
• Team site navigation – This provides the tools needed to navigate through team sites or sites for which publishing has not been activated, including Quick Launch and top link bar tools.
• Navigation web parts – Web parts provide additional navigation that can be added to the various pages within the site. They are available on the publishing sites.

The following navigation Web parts are available only for non-Publishing sites:

Categories – Displays categories from the Site Directory.

Site Aggregator – Displays sites of your choice.

Site in Category – Displays sites from the Site Directory within a specific category.

Tag Cloud – Displays the most popular subjects being tagged inside your organization.

The following navigation Web parts are available only on Publishing sites:

Summary Links – Allows authors to create links that can be grouped and styled.

Table of Contents – Displays the navigation hierarchy of your site.

• Navigation controls on page layouts

You can add navigation controls to a page layout to support navigation links in Web pages by using SharePoint Designer 2010 or Visual Studio 2010.

SharePoint Server 2010 includes the following navigation controls that can be added to page layouts:

Summary Links – After you add summary links control to a page, you can also change the appearance, organization, and presentation of the links in Summary Link control.

Table of Contents – You can use the Table of Contents control to add a table of contents of all or part of your site to a page layout. After the Table of Contents control is added in the page, you can specify which parts or contents can be displayed on the control, how the links are shown and organized.

Content Query – Content Query control can help you to link to pages or items that are displayed based on your designed query.