While clicking aimlessly around Central Admin today I thought “there must be a better way”. For all of the fancy new bells and whistles SharePoint 2010 offers, it sure did make CA navigation a bit cumbersome. Most tasks are 4 clicks away and I’m sorry but I’m just too lazy for that.
I tried editing the left Quick Launch, no luck. However, Top Navigation is wide open. The beautiful thing here is how it follows you anywhere in the site. From any CA page, you can see those Top Nav items staring right back at you.
- Open “Site Actions Site Settings Top link bar”
- Click “New Navigation Link”
- My favorite is to add “Manage Service Applications” to “/_admin/ServiceApplications.aspx” because so much time is spent here.
Also, Rez Khamis wrote http://sp2010resourcelinks.codeplex.com/ to help people populate the CA homepage “Resource Links” and is incredibly helpful. If you haven’t tried it then go download a copy. While you have to navigate through the CA homepage, it’s still much better than what the product offers out of the box.
