SharePoint 2013 – Navigation using Managed Metadata (Term Store)

Brand new in SharePoint 2013 is the ability to apply friendly urls to pages, goodbye to /Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=568 urls. Another huge improvement to Navigation is that we can manage it using the Term Store or Managed Metadata.

You will find the Term Store very familiar, it look and acts the same so creating terms won’t be too hard if you are used to SharePoint 2010. But in case it’s your first time, Managed Metadata means that “Terms” or words if you, will be centrally stored and managed. You can delegate the rights to manage the Term Group and provide ways of writing a word based on the language.

Here is how to manage SharePoint 2013 Navigation using Friendly URLs

1. Click on Site Settings (now on the top right)
2. Next, click on Navigation under “Look and Feel” usually on the top right
3. You will find yourself in the Global and Current Navigation settings menu. The Global Navigation is the menu at the top and the Current Navigation is the one on the left.
   For each of these you can choose to use “Managed Navigation” or “Structural Navigation”
   The one we are looking at today is Managed.
4. What we need to do next is to create our Navigation items in the Term Store. Lower in the page you will find an option to Open the “Term Store Management Tool”.
5. In the Term Store Management Tool, use the left pane to navigate to the Term Set you want to use for the navigation.
6. Using the little drop down arrow on the Term Set, Create Terms to reflect your desired navigation.
   
   
7. Now for each Term (navigation links) we have just created, use the tabs at the top to manage “Navigation” and “Term-Driven Pages”.You can choose between two Navigation Node Types:
   -Simple Link or Header
   -Term-Driven Page with Friendly URLThe Simple Link or Header is the more traditional hyperlink to an item or create a heading to group links.
   The Term-Driven is a little more powerful as it allows for friendly urls.
8. Next we will set the Friendly URL by moving to the next tab for the term, Term-Driven Pages. There you will find options to change the friendly url as well as setting the target page for the hyperlink. (Can even set SEO properties! – cool)Click on Save when you are done
9. Time to see the results, notice my url
10. Don’t forget that we are using the Managed Metadata Service (Term Store) which means you can have more than 1 level in the navigation.