Forum Discussion
SharePoint gear icon changes
Thank you ChrisWebbTech
It is custom orange color that aligns with our brand.
MicrosoftMahendran D Hi. I'm the engineering manager for the common O365 suite header and wanted to try to address your concerns.
I'll start with the good news - the suite header respects tenant-wide theming as set by the tenant administrator. You can set up your color scheme there and it will be consistent across SharePoint and most other O365 web properties. Tenant admins also have the option to restrict individual's access to custom themes, which will make the theming panel you see above shrink down quite a bit (we always offer a high-contrast option for users). You can find the options for both of these things in the O365/M365 Admin Center.
The bad news is that the new suite header does not, today, respect SharePoint-specific themes as set in "Change the Look". We're opting for suite-wide consistency over site-specific customizations here. We of course want your feedback on this. We have seen several customers raise concerns with it already.
Now I'll provide a little more context for the changes, in case it helps.
The recent changes to the suite header do two things. First, they move the underlying code to a modern, forward-looking codebase. This brings with it a much easier servicing model, better performance, and makes it cheaper and safer for us to introduce new suite-wide capabilities to Office365. But that's all "under-the-hood" stuff.
The second and more immediately impactful change is our attempt to bring the entire O365 suite in line to the same (or very similar) header experience. Prior to these rollouts, different O365 apps had considerable differences in their implementation and display of header features, SharePoint being the biggest outlier. With these changes, we're attempting to find the common ground between O365 suite-wide consistency, user personalization, and app-specific needs. We may not hit the mark perfectly each time, though, so it is important to us that you keep providing feedback. We do listen and your comments do inform future decision making.
Thank you.
Andy Tischaefer ...Could you please clarify the below points?
1. Is there any way to define a custom O365 theme or only options available are to choose from pre-defined ones that show up under the Settings gear or define the theme settings in O365 admin center under 'Custom theme for organisation'.
2. We have a custom background image uploaded in our tenant and the recent change has caused it to not work properly. New theme displays 'nav bar background colour' in left (app launcher) as well as right (user name and settings gear icons). The background image is added in the middle which means the whole top banner appears as three different parts: left (colored background), middle (background image) and right (colored background).
Regarding point 2, we tried some built-in themes e.g. the 'Beach Sunset' and noticed the background image displays seamlessly end-to-end from left to right. When I checked the HTML code, the difference is how background-color is applied. For the theme we set in admin center, a hex code is required for nav background color, whereas for 'Beach Sunset' background-color is set to rgba(221,115,125,.6). Hence, the theme we set in admin portal gets solid colored left and right sections whereas out-of-the-box ones get different treatment.
It's causing quite a bit of pain for us? I hope Microsoft designers can provide a way to fix this or at least provide the option to set colors in hex codes as well as rgba.
- Andy Tischaefer
Gurdev Singh thank you for your questions, I'm sorry to hear that you are having problems.
With regard to defining custom O365 themes, the only option provided today is the "Custom theme for organization". Can you elaborate on what you're looking for when you say you want to define a custom theme?
I'd like to know more about your custom background image issue. From my testing, behavior of admin-set custom background images before/after the modern header rollout didn't change from the old header to the new header. In both cases the custom image did not stretch to exist under the app launcher or the icons on the right side. If you're seeing something different, then we may be talking about different things here. One way to check, at least for a little while longer, is to load page that has your custom background image on Office.com or SharePoint, see how it looks, and then click on the user icon in the right corner of the header, select "My Account", and see what the background image looks like there. "My Account" are still running the old header code for the moment. If the background image acts differently in those two places, then that is a bug that I'd like to investigate, but I'm not seeing that in my own testing.
As to why custom images set by admins behavior differently than the background images provided as part of themes, I can assure you it has nothing to do with rgb vs hex values (the browser interprets those the same). This design predates my time on the team, but I believe the intent here is to ensure that the app launcher and icons are always visible - we can (and do) test the themes we ship, but we have no way to do that with custom uploaded images, so we restrict how far they are allowed to stretch. I will pass this feedback along to our design team to possibly reconsider this in the future.
In the meantime, can you clarify why setting custom theme information for your tenant, to a set of colors that is complimentary to the background image that you want to set, isn't an acceptable path forward? I'd like to know more.
Thanks Andy Tischaefer
The very serious problem for us is;
we are maintaining two different colors.
Brand color for company wide intranet and other color for team sites. Everyone got used to it.
I see that we cannot create a new custom theme boxes. Users need to select from those pre-defined ones which do not have our brand color.
Only way is; Tenant admin can set the custom color but it will be applied to all sites which we dont want.
We really need to have a feature that allows SharePoint Admins to set custom theme for site collection (either by UI or PowerShell) at least.
Thank you for considering user feedback.
