Customising SharePoint (to brand or not to brand...)

Some organisations have. Some haven't. I have heard a fairly standard argument for each side.

Against: The reason is generally that SP is an IT application, like Outlook, and you wouldn't put your branding on that, so why SP?

For: It's a corporate tool, and therefore should fit in with the corporate identity.

We chose not to brand or customise SP in any way. The point above seemed to be our official line, but in reality, the actual reason seemed to be that any kind of customisation would make an upgrade more difficult. We were of course implementing the 2003 version at a time when we knew the 2007 version was imminent.

Things are slightly different now. The 2007 version allows easier customisation - master page templates and CSS files can be changed in the browser and there is much more you can do using SharePoint Designer. This implies that customisation done on 2007 will not impact too much on future upgrades.

So, it's easier to customise now, so are organisations more likely to do it? Well, I can't speak for everybody, but we are.

We found that out-of-the-box navigation and look & feel, although much improved in the new version, is still not good enough for our needs. Also, where SP provides Themes, which can be a quick and easy way to give it a bit of a fresh look, they generally make content impossible to read. (Who ever thought that green text on a similarly green background would work?!)

So we're going down the route of a fairly simple customisation programme to amend the CSS and the master pages. Nothing too drastic, but hopefully something which will appeal to our users and make it a little bit easier to use.

Yes, it's just an application, but it's our application!