Greetings folks! Approximately four-score and seven years ago (in cloud-years), I posted a blog with a stated intention of it being the first in a series about the modern Microsoft enterprise productivity platform.
I assure you, that intention remains but it’s just taken me a teeeeeeeny bit longer than I’d expected to get to the second post in the series. Better late than never? I guess we’ll see…
NOTE: I’ll say/repeat what you all know: this “cloud stuff” changes fast - and as such, blogs about cloud stuff “drift” fast. The above post is dated; the high-level concepts still apply but you should ALWAYS rely on our docs which are official and kept up much more so than blogs.
I ended that last post with the initial AD + AAD hybrid ID service established and now, I’ll discuss custom branding across the EMS + O365 ‘space’ (along with Windows 10, these are collectively bundled as “Microsoft 365” or M365).
Some of the biggest aspects of a company’s “visual identity” are the branding elements. Logos, images, tag-lines and phrases, and other information, presented to users, helps ensure consistency, as well as reduce confusion by clearly indicating that ‘this is a legitimate service/notification from my company.’ Extending that consistent look/feel to corporate IT services as they move/expand to the cloud should be part of the integration planning and deployment.
Also, in many cases, there is policy text/verbiage that is important to display from a compliance standpoint.
Once you’ve customized branding elements, they’ll permeate across M365, including Azure AD/O365 sign in pages, MFA prompts, portals, Autopilot screens, and the Intune Company Portal, as well as on emails/notifications for end-users and/or operations folks.
Let’s take a look…
Azure AD - Company Branding
The primary location to customize branding for many aspects of M365 is in the Azure AD configuration.
Service settings:
Once you’ve configured the ‘service settings,’ here are some examples of the resulting customizations (UIs and emails).
Office 365 Theme
Some UI elements of O365 are also customizable.
Service settings:
Example:
Intune – Company Portal
You can customize elements of Intune, such as the Company Portal app/website and compliance emails sent by Intune, to match your corporate branding/colors, support links, etc.
Service Settings:
Company Portal App examples:
Intune – Non-compliance Notification Emails
Intune can generate/send emails to end-users if/when devices that they’ve enrolled fall out of compliance.
Service settings:
Microsoft Cloud App Security (MCAS) Policy Email Notifications
Service settings:
Custom branding alignment for SCCM Software Center
SCCM Software Center can be customized to match the other custom branding elements:
Service settings:
Bonus Nugget
As someone who works in these portals every day, it’s not lost on me that ‘portal sprawl’ is real. We are making things better with a move towards ‘role-based’ portals and ‘favorites’ or bookmarks can help, too.
However, here is a tip that helps me and the way I operate…
1. From the ‘main’ Azure portal (portal.azure.com), get to your ‘Dashboard’ view:
2. Click “Edit” along the top:
3. Add “Markdown” from the Tile Gallery:
4. Give your Tile a title and edit the HTML ‘content’…
<a href='https://portal.azure.com/#blade/Microsoft_AAD_IAM/ActiveDirectoryMenuBlade/Overview' target='_blank'>AAD Portal</a>
||
<a href='https://portal.cloudappsecurity.com' target='_blank'>MCAS Portal</a>
||
<a href='https://portal.azure.com/#blade/Microsoft_Azure_InformationProtection/DataClassGroupEditBlade/global...' target='_blank'>AIP Portal</a>
The result is a clean, easy launch-point for the various portals, all from my main Azure dashboard
So, there you have it, friends … a picture-heavy run-down of many of the cross-service branding customization capabilities, as well as a tip about living with portal sprawl.
As Porky Pig says at the end of each cartoon, “That’s all folks!”
Hilde
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