Category Archives: SharePoint 2013

What you need to know about Managed Navigation

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In 2013, if you go to Site Actions > Site Settings > Navigation (under the Look and Feel section), you will see the screenshot below. You need to have the “SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure” site collection feature activated to see the Navigation option. Any site that belongs to this site collection will now have the capability to use Managed Metadata based navigation, no matter which site template was used (you do not need to have a site created using the publishing site template or even have the “SharePoint Server Publishing” site feature turned on for this to be available.

MetadataDrivenNavigation.Figure1

You will notice the “Managed Navigation” option; this option is new in SharePoint 2013 and can provide you the following benefits.

  • Allows you to create navigation menus with 3 tiers (the other options allow you no more than 2 tiers)
  • A consistent navigation experience across sites, site collections, and even web applications (within a single tenant)
  • Flexibility to make changes to menus across sites without duplication of effort for each site
  • Ability to tag content and people with navigation items
  • Friendly URLs
  • Navigation item Pinning and Reusing

The only disadvantage to using the “Managed Navigation” option is that security trimming of the navigation items will no longer work. Managed Metadata Global Navigation is intended to provide a cross-site collection consistent navigation experience. Since each site collection is its own security perimeter, security trimming navigation items is not possible.

SharePoint User Profile Import / Synchronization

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SharePoint User Profile Import/Synchronization has gone through an evolution and has been the number one support issue for SharePoint 2010 at Microsoft. Needless to say, it caused us major issues with clients while Microsoft was figuring it out. So far with SharePoint 2013, it looks like they finally got it right, but time will tell.

 

Below is both a history of User Profile implementations and their issues, as well as links to instructions for properly configuring those various implementations.

 

HISTORY

SharePoint 2003 & 2007:

  • User Profile Import only
  • No issues with any release (that I am aware of, please update me if you are aware of any issues)

SharePoint 2010:

  • User Profile Synchronization (read or write, but not both on the same property)
  • Prior to the April 2012 CU (including SP1); Synchronization would do one of the following behaviors based on which CU you had installed:
    • Profile Synchronization service will not start
    • Profile Synchronization service starts, but synchronization fails
    • Synchronization succeeds once and only once (the full sync)
    • Synchronization succeeds on first full sync and further incremental sync, but fails further full syncs
    • other Sync DB issues, see here
  • As of the April 2012 CU; Synchronization just works with the following notes:
    • There is still a bug where a UPA created with a Windows PowerShell session not running as the Farm Account prevents provisioning of the UPS service instance, has NOT been fixed. We still need to use the workaround here
    • There is also no change to the support of only a single OU per tenant for Synchronization

SharePoint 2013:

  • User Profile Import or Synchronization
  • It appears as if Import does not understand Subscription IDs and therefore cannot be used with a Partition Mode UPA. This may prevent My Sites from working…
  • I have not tried synchronization yet, please provide your experiences…

 

CONFIGURATION

  1. For all versions of SharePoint, you will need to use a domain account for import/synchronization and provide that account the “Replicate Directory Changes” permission.  The following article is directed for SharePoint 2010, but has the same necessary steps for all the other SharePoint versions.
  2. Configure import or synchronization in SharePoint
    1. User Profile Import
    2.  User Profile Synchronization