Best way to make a global navigation over multiple sitecollections

Question

I'm searching for an easy way to make a navigation over multiple Site-Navigations:

SC1 Home
  - SC1 Page1
  - SC1 Page2
           - SC1 Page3
SC2 Home
  - SC2 Page1
  - SC2 Page2

I have tried the following:

1. Term Storage: Works on one SC but you can't assign it to a second SC.
2. Javascript solution from this site: I can't get it running because of some errors.
3. Implementing it on my own from a JSON or XML file. This solution would work but I don't know how I find out which Page is selected at the moment.

What is the best way to implement global navigation in Sharepoint 2013 over multiple SiteCollections?

Answer 1

The easiest thing that we found was to create the navigation within the Global Term Store for the web application, not at the Site Collection level. Then you have your Site Collections pin the term set from the global term store. Essentially creating this kind of relationship:

Site Collection A Local Term <== Global Navigation Terms ==> Site Collection B Local Term

This works well because changes to the Global Navigation terms will then be reflected in SCa and SCb.

If you needed a clearer set of instructions on how to do this let me know.

EDIT (added clearer instructions)

As you can see in the image (https://i.sstatic.net/Geh6J.jpg) we essentially have our navigation items that get pinned, or shared down, to the Site Collections we need to use them on. You can then share that navigation across site collections. Take a close look at the pin icons and you should see what I mean.

This is all explained in detail in the TechNet article located at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn194311.aspx#section2

Answer 2

I'm currently implementing a global navigation using search (KeywordQuery to be precise).

You can retrieve all SPSites / SPWebs the current user has access to by using this query:

contentclass:STS_Site OR contentclass:STS_Web

(See this post for an overview of content classes [SP2010]).

Finally I categorize the results by some custom properties stored in each SPSite's RootWeb (e.g. 'project site', 'department site', 'workgroup site', 'information site for all employees', ...).

If you've configured continuous crawl for search, you (should) always have up to date and security trimmed data for your navigation without the need to maintain a second data pool.

For testing purposes the results are currently displayed as a link list in a custom webpart only. My next development step is to include the logic and the results in the Suite Links area grouped by 'site type' (project, department, ...) using Callouts.

Answer 3

The javascript solution pointed with errors on the second try of this question have an update from the same author precisely to address javascript errors and to achieve what pointed out on the third try (selected page or link). It's briefly commented on an answer of a linked question of this thread.

The best way could be the one by MAllen22842 specially on cases with few site collections; however the updated by Waldek Mastykarz or even the second solution referred on the answer previously mentioned are harder to implement but could be the answer on scenarios of a lot of site collections or dynamical creation of them.

Answer 4

I came up with the following solution for my case. It leverages a list and the JSOM to render a Global navigation within the Suite Links bar. I'm not sure if this is the best way from a performance standpoint, but it is a strategy that allows simple maintenance of the menu items once developed.

You also have the option of using a SharePoint list with a custom site map provider using the Heirarchical Configuration as described in this MSDN article