Sean Wallbridge
We are extremely excited to announce the opening today of the Public Preview for Masthead, a mega menu designer built for modern SharePoint. Today marks the culmination of months of hard work building out the product, but it feels like the product itself has been in development for far longer. As SharePoint consultants, we’ve seen first hand the challenges that a masthead addresses. Since the very early days of SharePoint (we’re talking WSS and MOSS) we have built many iterations of solutions to address the problem for clients both small and large. It’s what we’ve learnt from all these projects that come together in Masthead.
The problem is simple, to architect SharePoint properly you need to have multiple sites. This is true now more so than ever. With Office 365 Groups and Modern SharePoint sites, the days of being able to get away with a single site collection and a myriad subsites are officially over (and it was a terrible idea to begin with). We want to have distinct buckets for each collaboration and communication space, that properly leverages the tools in the Office 365 Ecosystem (Teams, Planner etc.). Now more than ever with SharePoint Modern sites we can put together a gorgeous, effective Intranet or Portal in SharePoint with minimal customization. However, after 7 versions of SharePoint spanning close to 20 years, there is still one fundamental piece missing. You cannot create navigation that spans across all of these sites without writing custom code. Without this integral piece these logical buckets of content become silos, users become lost and unable to find what they need, and SharePoint adoption suffers becoming “that thing nobody uses”. While we are aware of Hub Sites coming soon – from what we’ve seen so far, we don’t believe this will address the problem entirely.
We’ve solved this problem in different ways over the years through custom MasterPages, Delegate Controls, Client Side Embedding, Custom Actions, and finally with the SharePoint Framework Application Customizers. Masthead uses the SharePoint Framework for Modern Sites, and Custom Actions for Classic Sites to create a seamless navigation experience that’s ready for the ever-evolving world of SharePoint online. In addition, our visual mega menu designer and Masthead Installer allow you to easily manage your navigation content.
We look forward to gathering feedback as we enter the Public Preview phase, especially from the SharePoint Community. To learn more about Masthead visit https://masthead365.com, or to claim your 10% discount as part of the Preview Program go to https://masthead365.com/giddyup.