SharePoint 2013 Structured Navigation – Dynamic Menus Fixed – August 2013 CU

When many of us upgraded to SharePoint 2013, we quickly noticed that our SharePoint menus did not behave as expected. In particular with structured navigation we would only have three levels of our site included in SharePoint navigation. For most site structures this only left one level of dynamic menus. This issue was discussed at TechNet and I am happy to say appears fixed with the SharePoint 2013 August 2013 Cumulative Update.

August-CU-Navigation-DemoLearn more about the August CU over at TechNet, in particular I found a blog post from Stefan Gossner to be very informative.

A few key notes.

  1. Before you install the August CU, be sure to install the SharePoint 2013 March 2013 Public Update. Refer to another blog post from Stefan for additional information.
  2. Depending on your SharePoint 2013 license, you will be installing a different August CU. Get links for the different packages at http://blogs.technet.com/b/stefan_gossner/archive/2013/08/14/august-2013-cu-for-sharepoint-2013-has-been-released.aspx
  3. Also be aware that each of these installs is over 1.5 GB in size. Not only will they take time to download, they can take hours to install. Without any special tweaks, it took about 8 hours for me to install both patches on a development environment. I found a reboot was also required after each patch install.

    A few months back, Russ Maxwell discussed why SharePoint patches can take so long to install along with strategies to combat this. I have not tried these myself but for you hard core admins, you might find his suggestions valuable.

  4. This CU just came out. What that means is that this may cause you additional problems down the line. If there is an August CU recall, or new issues are traced back to this CU, I will let you know as soon as I find out.
  5. I have installed this CU in our environments and not only can I confirm that the dynamic levels in structured navigation issue has been resolved but I have seen no new bugs arise because of the CU.

Let me know how this update works for you.

Speak Your Mind

*