The Hidden Costs of Branding SharePoint

The Hidden Costs of Branding SharePoint

There Are Two Parts to Branding SharePoint

I think most people would also agree that there are two parts to Branding SharePoint:  knowing what to do and knowing how to do it.  Unfortunately in the world of Branding SharePoint​, it seems like most of the discussion is focused on the “how to” portion and very little time is spent on the philosophy of what should and should not be done.


Now that SharePoint has been growing in popularity for several years, many companies are on their second or third implementation.

Before You Embark on Your Journey

For anyone about to embark on the journey of Branding SharePoint intranet environments let me identify a philosophical element that you may want to discuss with your team before you get too deep into the project. Implementation.  When coming into contact with these intranets it’s interesting to see just how different their branding results are and how philosophies, experience and even corporate politics combine to create amazing successes and staggering failures.

Just How Ugly, Broken, Incomplete is SharePoint?

Some people approach SharePoint as if they were going to build a website with Dreamweaver.  For them SharePoint is a quirky yet powerful development environment and available site templates are ignored .  They create lots of master pages, add loads of CSS, and let bits and pieces of SharePoint functionality peak through under their strict control.

At the other end of the spectrum are the people that see SharePoint as a pre-built business machine, ready to deploy Team Sites with Calendars, Lists and Libraries that are immediately usable by managers and their employees.  These people quickly deploy a series of SharePoint site templates and lean heavily on themes and lots of small graphics to “dress up” the site collection.

While both methods can result in success or failure, the second approach seems to consistently yield an environment with a lower cost of ownership. There are SharePoint Branding Accelerators that make this process much simpler and allow for an easier migration.

Lower Benefit from SharePoint that Doesn’t Look Like SharePoint

The further that you get from SharePoint that looks like SharePoint the less your organization can benefit from off-the-shelf training materials. Additionally, while I’ve never seen anyone have an issue with getting their data out of a heavily branded SharePoint environment, layout and interactivity that is dependent on custom code can prove to be problematic when it comes time to migrate.

So before you get started, ask yourself, how will your Branding affect the cost of supporting or migrating your SharePoint environment?