Managing your organization's brand with the SharePoint brand center

Hi Cathy_Dew. Thanks for the announcement.

The new Central Branding solution is looking promising. However, there are a few things I'd like to provide feedback on.

• Are you looking at the option to use the Private CDN? Turning on the Public CDN is potentially a blocker for us.
• What is configured (scope) when enabling the Public CDN for the Branding Center - does it just add a specific scope for the Org Library(s)?
• Really hoping you ensure the Microsoft example fonts are disabled (not shown) by default and we (your customers) can enable if we want. They are not at all in alignment with our brand so can't have them available to users, and likely won't be for most of your customers.
• One big gap is the ability to create a Theme and not make it available to users to apply to their sites. We have many scenarios where we want to apply a specific Theme to a set of sites (our Cultural Hub as an example). This has a very distinct Theme that shouldn't be used anywhere else in the tenant. This needs to be managed centrally but can't see a way to do this now. We are not looking to use the Site-specific Themes that you mentioned (see further comments about those later) as the Theme will be applied to multiple (select) sites.
• Really hoping you are looking to redesign the current Theme builder as it's very limited (similar to the original Fluent UI one we used in the past). We still need to go into the JSON to change colors at lower levels for all of our Themes to get the look and feel we need.
• How do you identify sites that have used a particular theme? We need this for governance, especially if some of our Themes change over time. We are currently only able to do this using _api/web/PrimaryColor - which is not ideal and won't work if two themes have the same primary color.
• Are you looking to provide a way to hide individual Microsoft provided Themes (currently it's all or nothing)?
• It would be great if your Learn about themes link includes low level understanding of what colors are used where.
• PLEASE ensure the (upcoming) Site specific Theme option is DISABLED by default. The whole idea is that we can centrally manage our branding. We can't have our users start creating any theme they want across the tenant and destroy our Company Branding.

A lot of these are absolute blockers for us. Note that we have well over 100k SharePoint Sites and 65k+ users, so need to ensure we are managing our governance with everything that comes through from Microsoft.

Hello Cathy_Dew 

I have 2 questions:

1. is it (will it be) possible to access and manage the assets libraries from the Brand Center?
2. is it (will it be) possible to create and save a site template in the Brand Center, and by this way make it available in the site creation process as a custom template?

thanks 

Cathy_Dew Question, what is the current state of the brand center? Is Brand Center still in Public Preview or a state General Availability? Thanks for an update. 

What features and functionality have you planned for the Brand Center? It would be great if we could adjust the font sizes. Our brand fonts need to be bumped up a few sizes. Otherwise, they're difficult to read in the default settings. We'd also love to see some of the same color options we had with the old theme builder, with all the Fabric palette and semantic slots.

Cathy_Dew Hoping you and your team will respond to some of the posts here.

We just got the following Service Announcement:

[SharePoint Online] Microsoft SharePoint: Customize your individual sites and experiences with fonts and themes [MC905757]

• "Coming soon for Microsoft SharePoint: Site owners will be able to create font packages and themes for their sites and experiences by combining the branding assets that the organization provides or by creating their own."
• "Admins will need to take no action for this feature to be available. This will be available by default to all site owners without admin action and cannot be disabled."

Two key questions here:

• Will this only be available to Site owners if we enabled the Brand Center? If it will become available even if we don't enable the Brand Center, then that is a major concern and can NOT be rolled out to our tenant.
• Why is this rolling out with no option to be disabled? Microsoft always say they listen to their customers but continue to roll out features (that are mostly not ready) and more often than not, no way to disable.

Really hoping to get some responses for all feedback shared here.

Cathy_Dew  In relation to my post above. The new feature that allows Site owners to create their own themes and upload font packages imposes clear legal and compliance issues for our company and can not be enabled in our tenant (non-negotiable). It also completely destroys the ability to centrally manage any branding which completely goes against the centrally managing aspect of the new Brand Center (confused).

For everyone - this feature will be rolled out regardless of the Brand Center being enabled or disabled (what we've been told from Microsoft).

I've created a UserVoice for it (link below). This has already been raised with our corporate brand and legal teams to understand full implications. From our standpoint it needs to be disabled by default and us (your customers) to enable/disable as required.

Legal and Compliance Issue: Customize your individual sites and experiences with fonts and themes [MC905757] · Community (microsoft.com)

What permission level is required to manage these contents? Is being an editor on the brand center site enough? Thanks!

It's great to finally have a central place to create and manage themes, however, this still requires in most realistic scenarios the need to create and import themes via PowerShell. I'm not sure why you decided to leave out the capability to change the "themeLighterAlt" and other alternative colors in the theme pallet that are pretty commonly needed by most organizations. The "pick a primary color and generate and use what it spits out" just isn't good enough, and doesn't meet organization branding needs or produce a desired alternative for the alternate section backgrounds in SharePoint that you can choose from. Why not just roll this out with all those theme options to begin with?

grant_jenkins It seems that they don't intend to respond to these posts. Thank you for raising all these issues on user voice, I've upvoted both of your submissions there.

How does this affect sites that are attached to Hub Sites? We don't want any site admins to use any other themes besides the Hub Site.