Recently while working with a client, a requirement for
global navigation in their new SharePoint 2010 farm came up. They have approximately 10 web applications
with a minimum of 10 site collections per web application, so manually
maintaining the navigation at each site collection was out of the question. I therefore started to look at the usual
suspects for global nav. I went over the
SiteMapDataSource,
SharePoint 2010 Navigation
Menu, and multiple other custom solutions with them. Each one had its benefits and drawbacks but
we had just about settled on a robust custom solution when an idea came to me
while watching a St. Louis Cardinals baseball game (not important to the solution). What about the Managed Metadata Service? We were only going to have one service for the
whole farm and pretty much as long as the farm is up, so is the service (i.e.
not dependent on another web application).
So I started looking…
There is a label that could be used as the display name, a
large text box for description that could be used for the URL and built in
custom sorting and if needed could support multiple languages in the future. Once I determined that, it was just a matter
of some custom code and POC testing.
I started by setting up a Group, Term Set and the nested Terms
that would make up my navigation.
Assigning each Term a “Default Label”, populating the “Description” if I
want it to be a link or leaving it blank if it was just a container and
unchecking “Available for Tagging” for Terms but keeping it checked for the
Term Set (more on that later):
