Saturday, 3 October 2020

Advantage & Limitations of SharePoint Online Modern Communication Site Footer

In our previous posts we have seen how can we enable Footer, How to add, edit remove footer logo and links and set up audience targeting in Footer links. If you have not gone through that you can use below links to checkout it out:

So Let's see what is Advantage & Limitations of the Modern Footer.

Limitations
  • OOTB footer is available for only Modern communication sites. For Modern Team sites, it is not available

    This is the biggest obstacle to use OOTB Footer. You can't have it in Modern Team site template. So if your site structure has even a single modern Team site, you need to build your own custom SPFx Footer.  

  • OOTB Footer will not be visible in mobile resolution
    I believe with digitalization all around the world, people use their tablet and mobile more than their laptop and desktop. And Modern footer is not available in that is second biggest flaw. 

  • OOTB Footer will not be visible in site content, List/ Libraries and in classic settings/Site pages like settings pages
    It is not visible in site content, list and libraries as well in Modern Communication Site. Also as these are modern feature, they will not visible in classic pages like site settings or classic site or publishing pages.

  • You can set Max 8 links/ Label in OOTB Footer except logo and footer display name
    8 Links - is very less limit. For simple layout footer we can see it will feasible but if you have extended footer layout, it looks very limited.

  • External user can not edit the footer even though you have given them full control rights
    I believe this is due to security concerns. 

  • You can not use SharePoint site groups for Audience targeting
    You need to use office 365 security groups or Modern team sites office 365 groups for the audience targeting. In this scenario, if you have just site collection admin rights, you are not able to do anything. In classic SharePoint, SharePoint groups were there. So I hope Microsoft might find a way to bring that back.

Advantage
  • Easy to configure
    The good thing is you don't need to know rocket science to configure this. Just enable a toggle button and add some links and you have a footer ready. 

    You are given a 2 types of layout to choose from. Also you can make changes in each site as per your requirement as all sites have their own footer.

  • End user or client can maintain this by themselves with minimal guidance
    This is toughest job as handover to client. You need to make sure once your work is done, anyone with given guideline can maintain things. And in compare to customized SPFx extension it will be less easy to train uses to use OOTB Footer

  • Does not occupy space on the page
    This is the best thing about that. OOTB footer append at the end of the page. Means you have full body visible. In custom SPFx, the footer will have its own part at the page. So the body content reading is an issue. See below images for example.
OOTB Footer




SPFx Extension


You can go with OOTB as well custom SPFx Footer as per your requirement. If you want to go with OOTB Footer, please convey the limitations to the end client first.

This is the end of our Footer Series. Let me know if you have any queries, then I will be happy to answer. 

Reference
  • https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/dev/features/site-footer
  • https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/customize-the-navigation-on-your-sharepoint-site-3cd61ae7-a9ed-4e1e-bf6d-4655f0bf25ca?ui=en-us&rs=en-us&ad=us

-

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)