Setting audience for Navigation Link can be tricky

Setting audience for Navigation Link seems to be pretty simple task. Yet one day I created dedicated SharePoint group for audience to global navigation item leading to other site collection and … it did not work.

SharePoint audience group had one member only: it was AD security group. It occurred that SharePoint audience group needed “Restricted Read” permission for the site containing navigation item. This was strange for me, because all the members of the AD security group had permissions even of higher level for this site. Well… another tricky SharePoint thing.

You can ask why not to grant permission directly to the AD group? Yes, I did it and it worked. But then I discovered that AD group was sort of unrecognizable for SharePoint:

And it still worked but to change the Navigation Link I had to specify the AD group again! 

It was annoying enough to select solution with SharePoint group rather.