Branding SharePoint: The New Normal

Thanks Bob. This is an excellent post. All the important points covered and so well that I've already shared with key decision makers in our migration project from SP2010 to Office 365 and SharePoint Online to help them better understand the issues surrounding branding.

While this post succinctly explains why we're limited to what we currently have we still need to be able to provide larger organisations with greater branding and UX control over their entire tenant. The missing piece is that organisations have to cede branding control of their most actively used online properties to the Office 365 app launcher and a logo link. Users transitioning between Office 365 apps such as SharePoint Online to Outlook to Planner to Teams loose access to rich navigation controls to move seamlessly to other organisational web properties. With Office 365 becoming more and more prevalent this is the missing feature.

Microsoft has progressively expanded the Office bar deeper into the various apps within the Office 365 ecosystem which is good and probably provides enough for a SME but larger organisations are going to have a significantly larger digital footprint and have a need for global navigation structures not available in the Office 365 app launcher. A global header and potentially footer such as those available in SharePoint Online via SPFx would provide that additional reach back into organisations back end systems and fill that gaping hole that this article addresses and brand managers are seeking to fill.

I don't see this as a feature that Microsoft needs to build as their own with easy CRUD features as I don't necessarily see that SME's are necessarily going to use it but providing a global placeholder below the Office bar will allow those with SPFx skills to easily provide global reach capability to those that need it.

And yes I will be adding this to user voice as a feature suggestion.