The SharePoint Brand Centre is a centralised branding management application within SharePoint that allows organisations to create and maintain a consistent visual identity across their digital workplace. It allows businesses to align their internal communication platforms, such as intranets and collaboration sites, with their corporate branding, ensuring that everything employees see reflects the company’s look and feel.
Branding in SharePoint goes beyond aesthetics; it plays a crucial role in employee engagement and experience. A well-branded SharePoint site helps reinforce company culture and identity, making employees feel connected and engaged with the organisation. Consistent branding improves recognition and trust in internal tools, helping employees navigate platforms more easily and feel more at home when using them. This is especially important in larger organisations or those with distributed teams, where a unified digital experience is essential to fostering a sense of community.
Key Features of SharePoint Brand Centre:
- Custom Themes: SharePoint allows organisations to create custom themes, where colours, fonts, and logos can be adapted to align with the company’s brand guidelines. These themes can be applied consistently across all SharePoint sites and subsites to maintain a uniform look.
- Customisable Layouts and Templates: SharePoint Brand Centre provides customisable page templates and layouts, allowing organisations to design unique and visually appealing pages that still adhere to their branding. This is useful for creating department sites, project hubs, or a tailored intranet experience.
- Logos and Imagery: The Brand Centre ensures that company logos, banners, and other imagery are placed correctly and consistently across SharePoint, reinforcing brand identity at every touchpoint.
- Navigation and User Interface Elements: Organisations can customise site navigation menus, buttons, and user interface elements to ensure they reflect the company’s design language, contributing to a cohesive user experience.
- Integration with Viva Connections: The Brand Centre integrates seamlessly with Viva Connections, extending the branding capabilities to the employee experience platform. This integration ensures that the branding is consistent not only within SharePoint, but also across other Microsoft 365 services.
While the SharePoint Brand Centre offers flexibility, there are some limitations:
- Customisation Depth: Advanced customisation, such as heavily modifying the layout or adding complex functionality, may require the use of SharePoint Framework (SPFx) or third-party tools, which can increase development costs and complexity.
- Mobile Experience: Although SharePoint is responsive, some custom branding elements may not display perfectly across all devices, requiring additional effort to ensure a seamless experience on mobile.
- Design Constraints: SharePoint’s branding options are robust, but they still operate within the platform’s predefined structure, which can limit full creative freedom compared to a custom-built website or application.
- Single Brand Centre per Organisation: Currently, SharePoint only allows one Brand Centre per organisation. This limitation can be restrictive for large enterprises with multiple sub-brands or diverse branding needs.
- Dependency on Public CDN: The Brand Centre requires the use of a Public Content Delivery Network (CDN) to store and manage assets. This dependency might post challenges for organisations with strict data governance policies or those operating in regions with limited CDN availability.
In summary, the SharePoint Brand Centre is a powerful tool for managing and maintaining a consistent brand identity within SharePoint. By centralising branding assets and offering easy-to-use customisation features, it enhances employee engagement and ensures a cohesive digital experience. However, organisations should be aware of its limitations and plan accordingly to maximise its benefits.
