Enabling Global Navigation in the SharePoint Home Site

Over the last few months – since around January – I’ve needed to enable Global Navigation in a SharePoint Home Site as part of three new Intranet launches. In each case, it took a VERY long time to take effect and/or didn’t happen until I worked with Microsoft to come up with an unexpected fix.

The main benefit of enabling Global Navigation is it gives us consistent navigation in the SharePoint app bar, as shown in this Microsoft Learn article: Set up global navigation in the SharePoint app bar | Microsoft Learn. The Global Navigation you choose is then available in the app bar from anywhere in SharePoint.

Additionally, once you have Global Navigation enabled – and available – you can turn on Viva Connections in Teams to give direct access to your Internet there. It’s pretty slick, even if you don’t care about any of the additional capabilities of Viva Connections (and I haven’t ever had a client who wanted more than access to the Intranet).

To enable Global Navigation, we must have a site set as a Home Site. Without additional licensing and complexity (which I’m going to skip here), you can only have one Home Site. Once you’ve enabled the Home Site, the Global Navigation settings can be accessed via its settings menu:

As you can see in the highlighted text from the Global Navigation UI, this change should take effect in just a few minutes.

In my three tenants, this isn’t what happened. For each tenant where I made this change, the Global Navigation didn’t appear in an hour, a day, a week, even over a month. Certainly not a few minutes!

I filed a support ticket in the first instance, and after a few weeks of back and forth with the Microsoft support folks, wasn’t having any luck. What fixed it in that case was essentially just jiggling the handle. I turned things off and back on, I re-uploaded the icon, etc. Finally, after some combination of those actions, the Global Navigation showed up – almost immediately after whatever my last action was.

So, I won that one, but I didn’t really know why.

With the next two, I tried all those jiggling activities, but wasn’t getting any joy. After over a month, I wasn’t sure I was ever going to get this working. During this time, I was occasionally in touch with a few Microsoft people through the MVP channels which I can access. They had me check a few things, but none of them seemed like they should be related.

Finally, we hit upon a solution. It wasn’t the way things are supposed to work, and in fact, it directly contradicted the documentation. In the support article Choose settings for the Viva Connections app – Microsoft Support, it explicitly says: “Confirm your organization has a home site and has enabled global navigation before customizing Viva Connections app settings for end-users in Microsoft Teams.”

However, my contact suggested checking the status of the Viva Connection experience. Here’s what I saw.

As I would have expected, it was in a Draft state – I hadn’t enabled it. Remember that we have to enable Global Navigation first, per the documentation both above and elsewhere. They suggested enabling the Viva Connection experience, anyway. This setting can be found in the Admin Center: https://admin.microsoft.com/Adminportal/Home#/viva/connections/experiences So, I enabled the Viva Connection experience. And waited. After 15 minutes of refreshing the Home Site’s home page, I didn’t see anything. I figured, what the heck, I’d turn off the Global Navigation and turn it back on – jiggling the handle again.

Success! The Global Navigation showed up almost instantly after turning it on again. This worked in both tenants, too!

No, this isn’t how it is supposed to work, but it does seem to fix the problem – at least it did in two tenants for me. I’m writing this post in case it’s also happening to you.

To summarize, the winning combination of steps was:

• Enable the Viva Connection experience here: Microsoft 365 admin center https://admin.microsoft.com/Adminportal/Home#/viva/connections/experiences
• Turn the Global Navigation setting in the Home Site OFF and save
• Turn the Global Navigation setting in the Home Site ON and save

The Global Navigation then appeared in the SharePoint app bar almost immediately.

Luckily, I have some very patient clients. Thanks to them for that.