SharePoint Brand Center - Controlling who can see the branding assets

[grant_jenkins]

I've been looking at the new Brand Center and the promised "central" branding. However, it doesn't seem that we will truly be able to centrally manage anything.

Scenario: Our branding team wants to push out some custom branding to a particular Hub site and sites associated to the hub. However, they don't want the branding assets they use for this (themes, fonts, images, etc.) available for anyone in the company to use (via Change the look or the Organizational Assets Library). From my research so far, it looks like any branding assets used for a site will then be available for everyone in the business to be able to use/apply in their own sites, and no way to hide them.

Can anyone explain/confirm if this scenario would be possible with the new Brand Center (branding assets not available to Site Owners/Members), or is it not actually going to let us "centrally" manage the branding? If the answer is "No", then that's a major let down and going to severely limit its use.

Also, looking to confirm if we can hide the Microsoft fonts, etc. that just appear magically when we enable the Brand Center.

@Cathy Dew I'd love to catch up and discuss about how the new Brand Center works in more detail. Been looking at all the documentation and still difficult to understand fully.

[#2]

Hello,

It is true that you currently cannot restrict branding assets.

However, with the standard organizational assets library, it is possible to manage permissions because it is based on a standard document library.

[#3]

Hi,

Hopefully they change how they've architected it (not able to restrict fonts, themes, etc. is a showstopper). Currently, there's no way we can't look to turn on the Brand Center - it completely goes against Microsoft's idea of "centrally" managing branding - there is no way to manage anything.

We've been waiting for the branding for over a year now (had a run through from Microsoft via NDA quite a while ago) and completely misses the mark from where it was initially positioned. The ability to "centrally" manage branding for certain sites is a fundamental requirement for almost all companies. For example, we would want to set up a unique brand for our Cultural hub and can't have those branding assets available to the rest of the company to use in their sites. We have over 90k sites and a lot of individual branding requirements (similar to the Cultural hub example) but looks like it's not going to be possible.

Fingers crossed Microsoft have something planned so it's usable in future.

[#4]

In relation to "However, with the standard organizational assets library, it is possible to manage permissions because it is based on a standard document library.". This won't work either. If we use an image in one of our designs (for example a Cultural Hub) we don't want everyone to use that image across their sites, but we do want everyone to be able to view the site (including the image). If we remove permissions for that image in the Organizational Assets Library, it will give them an access denied error when they try to access the site. When adding images to your site from the Organizational Assets Library, it's not a copy you get, it's linked (so everyone will need read access).

[#5]

Ah, what I ment by managing permissions for the document library is that in the org asset library, you could specify unique permissions for security groups within each folder. Allowing certain parts of the organization to access certain images.

But yes, you would also need a global org asset folder to use content that is ment for everyone.

Finally, it comes to your challenge, if they are accessible, then they are reusable. I would recommend creating a feedback post here:
https://feedbackportal.microsoft.com/feedback/forum/06735c62-321c-ec11-b6e7-0022481f8472