Display Portal Site Collection within master page

Question

I have a couple of nested site collections e.g.:

• http://intranet (Site Collection Name: Intranet, Portal Site Collection)
• http://intranet/sites/sales
• http://intranet/sites/marketing

Is there a SharePoint/ASP.NET control that could display the name and URL of the Portal Site Collection (Intranet). I am not looking for a code solution but for a control that I could embedded intro master page as part of breadcrumbs trail e.g. Intranet > Sales > Telesales

Answer 1

For a no code solution, you could try building a custom sitemap

http://blah.winsmarts.com/2008-1-Implementing_Consistent_Navigation_across_Site_Collections.aspx

<siteMap>
  <siteMapNode title="Intranet" url="http://intranet">
    <siteMapNode title="Sales" url="http://intranet/sites/sales">
    </siteMapNode>
    <siteMapNode title="Marketing" url="http://intranet/sites/marketing">
    </siteMapNode>
  </siteMapNode>
</siteMap> 

Then set the SiteMapProviders for your breadcrumb control.

<asp:SiteMapPath
    runat="server"
    SiteMapProviders="SPSiteMapProvider,SPXmlContentMapProvider"
    RenderCurrentNodeAsLink="false"
    NodeStyle-CssClass="breadcrumbNode"
    CurrentNodeStyle-CssClass="breadcrumbCurrentNode"
    RootNodeStyle-CssClass="breadcrumbRootNode"
    HideInteriorRootNodes="true"
    SkipLinkText=""/>

Answer 2

Have you tried configuring the Portal Site Connection in the Site Collection Administrators setting for each site to point to the "Intranet" site? I'm a little rusty on this, but I think that in SharePoint 2007 that would set the breadcrumbs up to work properly with the Portal as the top-level site for the navigation.

Based on what I'm seeing here, I would expect that to work the same way: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263357.aspx.

John