Controlling SharePoint's Global Navigation

Lesley and I were talking about how we as members of the WebCS Owners
group can keep full control of the Global Navigation menu on the new design, thus preventing editors from changing the global nav in their site. Editors will need to
have access to the Site navigation so it isn't a matter of restricting their permissions. The way we set this up in the current site is to use a custom list to hold the global navigation entries.

There is a way to specify the Home site's global navigation instead of the current site's global navigation. By using the 2 properties below we are telling the menu to only use the Home site's global navigation when populating the menu for all sites.

<PublishingNavigation:PortalSiteMapDataSource
...
StartFromCurrentNode="false"
StartingNodeUrl="/"
.../>

What this means is editors can make changes to their site's global navigation settings without affecting what is displayed on the pages. Webmasters can make a change to the global navigation entries in the Home site and it will affect all sites regardless of whether or not the sub-sites are inheriting.