Hi there,

We have SharePoint 2013 with many site collections - 3 Site Collections for New York sites and the about 40 Site Collections for California sites.
On the top navigation (Global Navigation) we do not want to clutter with all of California Site Collections (they are too many) - so we just want to show a link called "California Sites" and on mouse-hover show just those site collections. The 3 Site Collections meant for New York should still show as normal on Top Navigation (Global Navigation).

How to achieve this please?

Thanks a lot.

Hi frob,

It depends what your requirement. 

Solution1: You can go to site settings> Navigation>Add Headings (Here you can give your Top level site collection)> Then you can start adding links under this Headings.

Remember this solution you will manually have to add on every site collection where you want to have this global navigation.

Solution2: Create a Master page. You can go through this link. This link will show you how to achieve the same using sitemap.

http://www.sharepointdiary.com/2012/01/custom-top-navigation-using-sitemap.html

I hope this helps you.

Thanks,

Hi,

If you would like to put site collection list to global navigation you would need to manually manage it, which means you would need to add static links to global nav or as proposed use site map as global nav provider. What is the downside to this approach is that link would not be security trimmed.

What would I do in such case is that I would configure Search web parts to serve as navigation. This way when you create a new site collection it will be automatically show up in the web part and navigation would be security trimmed for users.

Hope this helps