Branding SharePoint 2007 – Make it Personal

Over the past 7 years, I have been building web based solutions for companies. Several years ago, the company I work for released a reporting producted that was sold as an out of the box solution. Which, in a sense it was, but all of the templates were branded with our company logo. To my knowledge, not a single one of this customers is still using the product. But then about 3 years ago, they started selling it along with professional services and we began building custom solutions for each customer. The first thing that draws attention, is that fact that now we brand it with THEIR logo. We try to do all color schemes based on their logos. This makes the solution theirs, not ours. You can not believe the impact branding internal solutions has with your target audience.

As often is the case, companies don’t spend much time on internal development. The biggest reason, there isn’t any profit in doing so. Often companies feel like it will just cut their profit margin even more considering that they have to either have the in-house talent or contract it out. And if you have the in-house talent, then you have to take them away from their normal duties to work on internal projects that are not considered profitable.

What many companies fail to admit is that employees often spend more time working around half baked ideas and poorly designed internal solutions. When it would have been more efficient to spend the time and money to do it right the first time. SharePoint is a great example of software that has great potential and almost limitless possibilities, but is often quickly installed and used to store, not really share, documents. Many times it is some IT person who is tasked with setting up SharePoint but hasn’t worked with it in the past and doesn’t have time to learn all the ins and outs of it.

How many times have you seen forms sent out to employees and customers? They have to fill it out, then they either have to fax it back or scan and email it to someone. SharePoint allows you to build forms right inside the portal. You can use InfoPath and create excellent forms and surveys. Why have a bunch of separate mapped drives for documents, SharePoint does an excellent job of storing documents. In today’s world, blogs are all the rage. With SharePoint, you are able to rapidly create a blog for you company. If you are unfamiliar with what a blog is, the site you are currently visiting is a blog, but you can get more details at Wikipedia. Or you may want to provide you employees with a Wiki site. I have seen a few companies that manage all projects through an internal Wiki. Visit Wikipedia for more details on what a Wiki is.

Before you begin working on branding SharePoint, you will want to purchase Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007.

From Microsoft

Create powerful solution applications on the SharePoint platform to enhance your productivity and deliver rich-looking sites.

Today, I want to add our Logo to our new SharePoint 2007 server. The server was just installed yesterday and I will begin configuring it today. I will be using Shane Perran’s blog posting Add your company logo to all sites in a site collection to complete this task. The reason I am using his, is that he cuts through all the dialog and gets straight to the point. Within 5 minutes, our SharePoint site has our logo proudly displayed. Below is the completed work. You will also find a list of additional reading at the end of this blog.

Additional Reading:

Customizing and Branding Web Content Management-Enabled SharePoint Sites
Add your company logo to all sites in a site collection
Customizing the Look and Feel of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 – Custom Chrome / Branding
How to rebrand the WSS 3.0 / MOSS Navigation with only CSS Baby!
CSS Options with Master Pages
Sharepoint 2007 Customization Ramp Up – Part 3: Basic Customization
Simple Branding on a SharePoint 2007 Site Collection
7 Development Projects for SharePoint – online book
Modifying the WSS3 tree navigation control