Use SharePoint Search To Navigate Between Site Collections

In a new SharePoint Online tutorial in the kalmstrom.com Tips section I show how you can use SharePoint Search to navigate among site collections.

Multiple site collections instead of big ones
I usually advise customers to create several site collections, for example one for each department, instead of having everything in the same site collection. It will be easier to manage, and you can set different permissions on each site collection.

But for this to work well it is important that the navigation between the site collections is quick and easy to understand.

Scalable navigation
When you start building a SharePoint tenancy you will only have a few site collections, and you might want to put links to them in the global or top navigation of each root site. This works in the beginning, but it is difficult to scale up such a navigation. That is one of the reasons I recommend the Search navigation instead.

Search vertical
People are used to searching, so if you add a search vertical for site collections to the Search Center, users will understand what to do with it. I wrote about search verticals in an earlier blog post, and the kalmstrom.com Tips section has several articles on search verticals. A Search link in the top navigation can open the Search Center with the site collection vertical active.

Promoted links or hotspots image
Direct links to the most important site collections in the Search Results web part are especially useful to new employees who don't know the organization so well and might not know what to search for. You can also add links in the form of promoted link tiles or a hotspots image.

I show more tips on how to enhance the Search navigation in the Tips articles, so welcome to have some inspiration!

Peter Kalmström
CEO and Systems Designer
kalmstrom.com Business Solutions