Setting up navigation for your workplace
Navigation menus give your users access to information and catalog services. As an administrator, you can specify whether a page appears in the navigation menu. Your pages are not visible to your end users unless you add them to the navigation menu. Use the Navigation Manager to create single or multilevel menus for the desired page navigation and to direct users to the correct content. You can specify the landing page for end users. To provide a personalized experience, you can customize the landing pages for various groups of end users based on their roles or needs.
The following image is a visual guide to creating a page and making it available to your end users, and shows the current step that you are on:
Scenario
Apex Global is a retail company with a chain of grocery shops. Allen is a BMC Helix Digital Workplace administrator at Apex Global. He wants to set up a navigation menu for their organization's employee service portal. He designs a generic home page in Studio named Home. Allen also designs customized pages for the various departments, such as procurement, finance, marketing, HR , IT support, and so on, based on their roles and needs. Allen makes all the pages available.
Allen wants to configure the basic navigation menu for employees to access information and catalog services. He creates a navigation menu based on the preliminary requirements of the employees and adds core pages such as My stuff and Location. Allen further adds a label named Explore and selects the studio pages designed for lines of businesses such as procurement, marketing, HR, IT support central, and so on. The Explore section contains all the customized redirect pages nested so that employees can navigate to the specific page easily. Allen saves the configuration, and the menu gets mapped and reflected on the user interface of the employees.
See the image showing the interface for retail employees.
Allen can further assign the customized home pages to the specific teams, keeping a fallback landing page as Home to provide them with a personalized experience.
Pages available to configure the navigation
The published studio pages and search views are available in the Navigation builder's Available pages section. The available pages are categorized in the following way:
- Core Application pages—These are the out-of-the-box pages provided in the application that are available by default with no entitlements and visible to all groups of users.
- Studio—These pages are the desired workplace pages created in the BMC Helix Digital WorkplaceStudio. For more information, see Creating-pages-in-the-studio. The page entitlements are defined by the people groups. For more information, see Creating-people-groups-for-end-user-collaboration.
Embedded pages—These pages are the custom pages imported from the BMC Helix Innovation Studio. For more information, see Embedding-custom-pages-from-BMC-Helix-Innovation-Studio-or-external-sites. The pages are entitled to the user groups created in the BMC Helix Innovation Studio. For more information, see Creating users, groups, and roles.
- Search views—These pages are search view created in BMC Helix Digital Workplace Studio. For more information, see Creating-search-views.
- External Application pages—These pages are the pages from the external sites. For example, a browser page.
The following image shows all categories of the pages:
Hidden pages and search views
Hidden pages are published pages that are not accessible from the navigation menu. You can access the hidden pages through inbound links or through links on other studio pages. By default, published pages and search views are hidden and can be accessed through a shared link. Get the URL of a hidden page or search view from the Copy page URL action in the Actions menu of a published page.
Before you begin
Configure the page's accessibility and visibility. For more information about configuring page access and visibility, see Making-studio-pages-available-to-end-users.
As an administrator, you should know the preferred language of the end users so that you can localize the menu.
To create single and multilevel navigation menus
Create a navigation menu for your workplace to direct your users to information and services and to help them easily move between the pages and search views. Group related pages under a section by nesting them. The categorized pages are listed under Available pages to add in the navigation menu.
- Log in to the BMC Helix Digital Workplace Admin console.
- Select Configuration > Navigation Manager.
- To add a page to the menu, simply select the page in the Available pages section.
The page is listed in the area under Navigation Builder. The page becomes visible in the horizontal navigation menu of the end user console. - To create a multilevel or hierarchical menu, add a menu section, and then add pages under the menu section:
- In the Navigation Builder, click Add menu and give a meaningful label to categorize the pages that would be listed under it.
- Select the pages or search views that you want to appear under the section.
The pages are added at the end of the list. - Drag a page or search view to its desired position under the menu section.
- Delete the unwanted page or search view from the navigation menu by clicking Delete
.
If you delete a page or search view from Navigation Builder, then that page will not be displayed in the menu. The page or search view still remains available in the list under the Available Pages section.
The icon for deleting pages is visible by hovering over the page name, as shown in the following image:
- From the Menu languages list, select the appropriate language.
You can add and edit the labels of the menu names for the assigned language so that the end-user console displays those localized labels on the menu. However, you cannot edit the page name in the Navigation builder. - Click Save.
Advanced configuration for custom designed landing pages
As an administrator, you can configure customized landing pages to direct end users to relevant pages designed for their roles and needs.
Refer to the following list of topics to configure the landing pages:
Action | Reference |
|---|---|
Manage the visibility of the landing pages for a specific audience. | |
Control the visibility of the default My Activity landing page | |
Configure personalized home pages and after-request redirect pages for end users |