Managed Navigation: Adding Simple Link to global navigaation adds Friendly URL to pinned term sets

Question

I've created a Global Navigation term set so I can pin this to multiple site collections.

All seemed to be going well, I added a new term with a Simple Link URL to the Global Navigation and it replicated to all the pinned site collections. The following day I had a bunch more urls to add to the Global Navigation having migrated in some new subsites on one of these site collections. However, when I add the Simple Link URL on the global nav term set, it converts this to a Friendly URL on all the pinned term sets, so giving "Site not Found".

Could this be that when I create the new term in the global nav, it adds this as a friendly URL by default and then replicated this to the pinned site collection term sets, before I had chance to click the Simple URL and add it? So it seems to fail to update the pinned terms with the change from Friendly to Simple.

If I go to the site collection term set and delete it, then re-pin it from the global, it works fine replicating the Simple URL. But I don't want to have to do this for every site collection, every time I add a new term to the global nav. Any clues what's going on here? Timer job maybe?

Answer 1

I found you have to create your navigation term directly below the term set first, add its Simple Link, then Move it to the desired location in the navigation structure.

This seems to work as it's not pinned on creation, so doesn't propagate across the site collections. This gives you time to set it from a Friendly URL to Simple Link, paste in the url. Once you move this term below a pinned term in your term set, then it gets propagated across all the site collections as a Simple Link. Voila!!