In SharePoint, there are multiple navigation providers available for use. The following two navigation types come with a lot of flexibility.
- SharePoint Structured Navigation.
- SharePoint Managed Navigation
SharePoint structured navigation is the easiest navigation type of navigation because it saves you a lot of time, and it has lots of features like targeting the navigation element to a specific user as well as adding of link and sub links etc.
So why do I still have to go for managed navigation since the structured navigation is very easy to use. The answer is very simple. The managed navigation has got lots of advantages when comparing it to structured navigation. Here are some of those advantages.
- If your requirement is to have more than two levels of navigation element you have to use managed navigation.
- Managed navigation can be integrated with search and pages so the navigation term can be able to search.
- Ability to create friendly urls is an amazing advantage of managed navigation. Using this you can create your own custom url and target it to a page.
One of the disadvantage of using Metadata navigation is that, we can use a metadata navigation term with only one site collection.
One other important questions is, is it possible to make this security based? Yes we can make each navigation element to show up for the users who have permission to the target location of the navigation.
Follow these steps to help you get this done.
Go to term store – > Select the navigation term – > At the right side click on Navigation tab – > Select the radio button for Term driven pages with friendly urls.
Click OK
After the above configuration, click on Term Driven pages tab and customize the friendly url of the page the map it with the target location using the target page settings.
This configuration will make this navigation permission driven, only users with permission in the target sub site will be able to view it in the top navigation.