Permissions and Managed Metadata in Navigation

Question

So I've set up on SharePoint 2013 Managed Metadata Navigation for a site collection, inherits to all sites below. When I access as a "Site Member" or "Site Owner" I get to see the full navigation. When I access as a "Site Visitor" aka read only access, I get only a few selected sites on the navigation, where I can't seem to figure out the difference between the sites I can see and the sites I can't see. Permissions state at the site level that "Site Visitors" get read access to the entire site collection (basically "Domain Users" is a member of the "Site Visitors Group"). However when I temporarily bumped "Domain Users" up to "Members" I could see everything as just a domain user.

Any ideas on what could be the cause? Thanks!

Answer 1

Figured it out, might be a Microsoft issue.

For some reason, when you set a Navigation Term to "Simple Link or Header" and spell out the URL yourself, the navigation item is viewable to everyone. If you set the navigation term to "Term-Driven Page with Friendy URL" some sort of trimming happens, and only people with write access as well can view the Term. I'm not sure why this is however, but at least I have a workaround for letting visitors see terms.

Answer 2

I know its been so long but for someone in the future who has issues make sure you have below:

If you use the Term-Driven Page with "Friendy" URL (MS's typo, not mine), there are a couple things that must also be in place for it to show on the navigation for Users with just visitors rights:

In the Term Driven Pages tab of the Term Store Manager, you must have a target page assigned. If you have 'Friendly URL' marked, but no target page, the navigation will filter it from users to prevent bad links. Visitors (users with read only) must have read access to the target page you assigned. The easiest mistake to make is to assign it to a template page that has never been published. That also results in an access denied scenario that will hide the navigation from the user. If both of the above are done, it will show the navigation menu for read access users.