Simplifying Navigation: Site Map Changes

This post continues the "simplifying navigation" theme. As a brief recap, when it comes to navigation -  what might be intuitive to me might not be intuitive to a client using the system. In my experience "technology challenged" clients can get confused in surprising ways. One of those ways is by having too many navigation options. This might be what Microsoft would term the "power of choice" but often having too many choices can be a problem and should be curtailed.

As I mentioned in my opening post on this topic, keeping the CRM deployment "relevant" is axiomatic. And therefore making entities that are not relevant/used in a deployment "disappear" through the use of permission settings should always be done. I am not discussing that aspect in this post.

Rather I am referring to Site Map changes to eliminate some of the CRM areas.

Let me back up a little. Having the different navigation areas can be helpful, however as alluded to above, some clients might find the additional navigation "daunting". And this can of course be locked down by eliminating the other applications area by performing some simple manipulation of the Site Map. And users can subsequently access other areas of the application by configuing via the Options what areas they wish to appear in the Workplace. And the result is a simplified navigation that will look something like what's shown below.

This is not major rocket science of course but sometimes it's the small changes that can make the world of difference in a CRM deployment (or any technology for that matter). If you find that your users are "getting lost" you may want to consider simplifying the navigation as in this example.

Given that the Settings area has also disappeared (there's really no need to expose this area to the lay user), you might ask how we can navigate to that area of the application when administration or customization needs to be performed on the system - as changes to the Site Map or global in nature.

The answer to the above is to bookmark the other areas of the application so you can navigate directly to them. Here are some of these bookmarks:

• Administration: http://<server>/<org>/tools/Admin/admin.aspx
• Business Management: http://<server>/<org>/tools/business/business.aspx
• Customization: http://<server>/<org>/tools/systemcustomization/systemcustomization.aspx
• Data Management: http://<server>/<org>/tools/DataManagement/datamanagement.aspx
• Document Management: http://<server>/<org>/tools/documentmanagement/documentmanagement.aspx
• Product Catalog: http://<server>/<org>/tools/productcatalog/productcatalog.aspx
• System Jobs: http://<server>/<org>/tools/business/home_asyncoperation.aspx
• Templates: http://<server>/<org>/tools/templates/templates.aspx
• Audit: http://<server>/<org>/tools/audit/audit_area.aspx
• Reports: http://<server>/<org>/main.aspx?etn=report&extraqs=&pagetype=entitylist