For a large retail corporation that maintains sites for 800+ distinct vendors, a huge obstacle to overcome is to be able to access sites that pertain to each user quickly and efficiently. It is not feasible to ask users to navigate to Site Contents on the parent site each time they need to go to a vendor site. A form of site bookmarking is the core functionality required.
Objective
Present users with a collection of "bookmarked" sites that is unique to each user's login account.
Overview
Utilizing the Follow control that is a part of Office 365, users can follow pertinent sites to create a collection of bookmarks that can be presented on the parent site. Additionally, there is a search box where users can dynamically filter through all vendor sites and quickly add bookmarks. Although the parent site is a shared space, the bookmarked sites will be specific to each user.
Obstacles
Managing hundreds of vendor sites means the site directory will be quite expansive and lengthy. It is not feasible to ask users to scroll through the entire listing to find the site or sites they are looking for, especially if the listing is sorted in some method other than alphabetical order.
Solution
Fortunately, Office 365 includes a Follow control that allows users to keep up to date with sites, lists and libraries, and/or items and documents. Utilizing this functionality, users can "follow" a site, which will be recorded to a list. To display a customized collection of bookmarks, the content will need to pull from the listing of followed sites on a user by user basis. When users follow a site, a new listing is created and linked to a unique user ID. Upon loading the parent site, these listing are displayed at the top of the page for easy access.
Followed sites are distinguished with a filled-in star
Additionally, since the site titles are prepended by a unique vendor ID, a search control with dynamic filtering is implemented to assist in finding sites to bookmark or "follow".
Dynamic filtering of site listing by a filter value
