SharePoint Intranet: How We Did It, Part 5: Branding Decisions

Aloha from Maui, Hawaii! This week I discuss SharePoint branding decisions I made for the NBC Olympics intranet in London (part 5 of a series about creating a SharePoint intranet for NBC Olympics at the London 2012 Olympics). 

But yes, I'm finally home—this time, for a whopping week-and-a-half--just enough time to resuscitate the garden, remind my friends and my dog who I am, replace dead appliances, and get some serious work done! Then I’m blowing off to the Windy City, to take part in a SharePoint 2013 event in the USA: SharePoint Fest in Chicago, September 25-27. I’ll be delivering my one-day SharePoint Governance MasterClass—the only opportunity to catch it this year in the Midwest—and several sessions and panels.

Last week, in Switzerland, I had the pleasure of speaking about SharePoint 2013 at the highest levels—business impact, portfolio, and strategy---with the Switzerland SharePoint Community in Sursee. I also had the chance to meet with a global organization that's feeling the same pain we're all feeling with what are now “legacy” versions of SharePoint, to discuss approaches to solving their SharePoint pain.

So it was a busy week, which concluded with a day in London to visit a friend and—an unexpected surprise—to catch several runs of the marathon at the 2012 Paralympic Games. As much as I love the Olympics, I must say that the Paralympics are where it’s at if you’re looking for mind-blowing combinations of elite sport and inspiration. I wish what I did could impact the world as much as the Olympics and Paralympic Games, but I’m fully happy knowing that once in a while, I say something that really hits home for people, and helps them solve a problem they’re facing.

Seems I did that with a comment I made last week in Switzerland about branding SharePoint. So this week, I’d like to share that thought with you, as part of a look at the branding decisions I made for the NBC Olympics intranet in London.

We all know the scenario: a company doesn’t like the out-of-box appearance of SharePoint and wants to “make it their own.” Change the look-and-feel, add elements of corporate identity, etc.

Hopefully you also know the problem: as soon as you’re finished branding the current version of SharePoint, something changes, and your branding makes it difficult, costly, or impossible to adjust to the change. The change can come in several forms.

First, you might adopt a custom solution—particularly a third-party commercial product—that just doesn’t “look right” or perhaps even work right with your branding. Second—and certainly guaranteed—the next version of SharePoint comes out, looks completely different, and you have to adjust your branding to accommodate the changes Microsoft has made. “Modern” design in SharePoint 2013, anyone?

At NBC Olympics, I did very minimal branding. I’ve discussed pieces of it in various articles in this series, so to summarize from a pure branding perspective, take a look at our intranet home page ( see Figure 1).


Figure 1: NBC Olympics SharePoint Intranet Page (click image to see full size)

In other words, virtually no branding. Now this is where working on an intranet with a lifespan of three months is a bit of a luxury. In a more significant effort, I certainly would do a bit more branding—perhaps some color changes, and probably some custom navigation controls.

But that’s all. I’m a big believer in not over-branding SharePoint. Now, that statement and what follows applies to everything except your public website. Obviously, there are a lot of very solid reasons for branding the heck out of your public website. Caveat stated. Now, back to everything else.

Branding SharePoint takes a lot of time, resources, and skills to do correctly and, honestly, very few people do it correctly. I count on one hand the number of people I personally turn to for SharePoint branding, and I have a few fingers left, still. They are magicians, and for a public web site project, they are indispensable.

Branding SharePoint also leads to problems later, as Microsoft changes things and as third party tools are introduced.

But then there’s the marketing and corporate communications departments, particularly at big companies, who “own” web properties in an enterprise and feel the need to justify their existence by branding everything. [Warning: if you haven’t figured it out, this column is going to be a bit snarkey about branding].

How to deal with that? Help your organization come to consensus around these points:

Point #1: There’s a lot of legacy culture in organizations that everything web must be branded.

Point #2: Until just recently, there was a raging debate: is SharePoint a platform or an application. SharePoint 2013 clearly answers that: it’s an application. Many of us will continue to use older versions of SharePoint, and even 2013, as a platform, but Microsoft has laid out its direction, now. That should help.

Point #3: The world is moving towards apps, and even more specifically towards HTML 5 apps.

So here’s what I ask a company who is struggling with overbranding syndrome:

I assume you have finished branding Microsoft Office, right? You’ve modified the color schemes in Word, moved the ribbon to the company-standard side of the screen, changed the name of “Inbox” in Outlook to your tag line, and added your logo to the title bar, right?

Obviously, I don’t really ask such a snarky question to clients. But in my presentation last week, I made that comment and more than a few people wrote it down and said it made a difference for them. SharePoint is an application. Team sites, My Sites, the Search Center… it’s all just functionality. Just because it happens to be rendered by an IIS server doesn’t make it any more right to brand it than Microsoft Excel, Google Maps, OpenTable, or any other app you’re using stand-alone or integrated into a solution.

JUST SAY NO.

And, again, this doesn't apply to your public web site, and—just perhaps—you could convince me that the intranet home page (and just the landing page) should be branded. But stop there. Or at least try to put on the decelerator or brakes.

Set your talented marketing and communications people on to creating real and correctly-functioning templates for Word, PowerPoint, and Excel—something that I see very few companies have figured out how to do since those programs’ release two decades ago. There are plenty of things in your company that could use better, prettier, and more functional branding. Not SharePoint.