Structural Navigation vs Managed Navigation in SharePoint

Hi Friends,

In this post we are going to learn about the navigation options present in SharePoint Online.

Below are the two main out of the box navigation options in SharePoint
1) Structured Navigation
2) Managed Navigation

What is Structured Navigation?
This is SharePoint out of the box navigation used by default and it is based on the site structure we define for our portal.

Below are some of the advantages and disadvantages using Structured Navigation.

PROS	CONS
Navigation will be updated automatically whenever Sites are added. Easy to configure. Pages are automatically added. Security trimmed, so if a user doesn’t have access to a link it will not appear in the top navigation.	Slower performance with complex navigation structure having more than 10 levels. URLs are not friendly and can be hard to memorize. Homepages belonging to structured navigation links do not appear in search when you type a search term. Cannot tag a structured navigation link to a document that it may relate to.

What is a Managed Metadata Navigation?

Managed Metadata is a hierarchical collection of centrally managed terms that we can define, and then use as attributes. It uses a dedicated term set for site navigation and the terms correspond to the friendly URL segment created.

Below are some of the advantages and disadvantages using Managed Navigation

PROS	CONS
Easy to maintain. Significantly faster page loads. Pages with term show up in search results. Documents tagged with navigation term show up in search results along with homepage of term. Friendly URLs that are easy to remember. Easy to maintain with more options to target search. Pages are automatically added.	Not security trimmed, so if a user doesn’t have access to a link in the top navigation they will still see it but can’t get to it. Sites are not automatically added. Cannot be used across site collections.

Hope this helps...

How to create thumbnail/preview of any document or Image or Video in SharePoint

Hi Friends,

In this post, we are going to learn how to generate a thumbnail/preview of any Document or Video or Image in SharePoint.

Recently I came across a requirement to show some document links on a page but the links should be the thumbnail of the document instead of a plain text(document title). Please find the below approach I followed to achieve this.

getpreview.ashx is a http handler used to generate thumbnail/preview of any document(word,pdf, ppt etc.,), Image and Video which resides in SharePoint.

If you observe in SharePoint search results, when we mouse over on the search results we get a preview of that item. This is actually happening through http handler getpreview.ashx

This handler expects a parameter called “path” which expects absolute path of the doc/image/video. Please find the below sample URLs to generate the thumbnail.

Image:

https://yoursite.com/_layouts/15/getpreview.ashx?path=https://yoursite.com/PublishingImages/abcd.jpg

Document:

https://yoursite.com/_layouts/15/getpreview.ashx?path=https://yoursite.com/PublishingImages/Document/abcd.doc

Video:

https://yoursite.com/_layouts/15/getpreview.ashx?path=https://yoursite.com/PublishingImages/videos/abcd.mp4

This handler has also expects a parameter called “resolution” which has a predefined values 1, 2, 3 etc., for different resolutions of previews/Thumbnails. Please find the below sample URLs with different resolutions

https://yoursite.com/_layouts/15/getpreview.ashx?resolution=1&path=https://yoursite.com/PublishingImages/abcd.jpg

https://yoursite.com/_layouts/15/getpreview.ashx?resolution=2&path=https://yoursite.com/PublishingImages/abcd.jpg

Hope this helps…

RELATED POST: Image Renditions in SharePoint 2013

How to use Image Renditions in SharePoint

Hi Friends,

In this post we are going to learn What are the Image Renditions and how we can use it in SharePoint.

Image renditions helps to display a single image into various sizes based on our needs. Apart from choosing size, it also allows you to crop the image while adding it to the publishing page.

So based on our needs, we can display abcd.jpg as Logo, Banner and Thumbnail etc., This technique helps in reducing the size of the file that is downloaded to the client, which then improves site performance. You can find some of the ways to improve SharePoint site speed and performance here.

The other advantage if you notice, we need not to create different sized images i.e., one for logo, one for thumbnail etc.,. With Image renditions we can display a single image into multiple sizes.

Below are the prerequisites for using Image Renditions 

•  Publishing Site
• BLOB Caching enabled(Follow this link on how to configure BLOB cache and its uses)

Please find the below steps on how we can configure Image Renditions.

1.     Go to the top-level site of the publishing site collection.

2.    Choose the Settings icon. On the Site Settings page, in the Look and Feel section,  choose Image Renditions.

3.    This will show you list of available Image Renditions available on this site. We can  modify the existing one, Or we can even create our own based on required dimensions.

          4.       ID indicates the RenditionID. We will be using this RenditionID as a parameter to                       specify the dimensions of an image we need.

         5.       If we want to construct image URL directly from the RenditionID, we just need to                  add it as a  Query String.

Examples: If we want display abcd.jpg as 100*100 on a page, then my image source URL will be “abcd.jpg?RenditionID=1”

If we want display abcd.jpg as 200*200 on a page, then my imgage source URL will be “abcd.jpg?RenditionID=2”

        6.       If we want to insert the image in the page content then follow the below steps. 

a)     Edit the page and place the cursor in the Page Content field.

b)    From the Ribbon Insert tab, choose Picture, and then choose From    SharePoint.

c)     Select the image that you want to add to the page and then choose Insert. The image will be displayed at full size.

d)    Next on the Design tab, in the Select group, choose Pick Rendition, and then select an  image rendition whichever required. That’s it, the image will display according to the size  specified for the image rendition.

Hope this helps...