Category: O365

O365

Office 365 Theme to Match Your Company Brand

Heather Betzhold

Office 365 provides a fantastic set of tools for your business.  Out of the box it has a clean, modern look, with Microsoft’s trademark blue and black color scheme.  Tenant administrators can easily update the theme settings to match their company’s brand.

Log in to the Admin Center https://portal.office.com/adminportal/

Choose “Settings” > “Organizational Profile” in the left navigation, and then click “Edit” next to “Manage custom themes for your organization“.

ManageCustomThemes

Select custom logo image

Upload your company logo or another image.  It will appear in the center of the “suite bar” at the top of all your Office 365 browser applications.  The image must be in .jpg, .png, or .gif format.  It should be 200 X 30 pixels, and cannot be larger than 10 KB.

suitebarnew

Enter a URL that users can link to if they click on the custom logo image.  I recommend linking to the home page of a SharePoint intranet site, but you can put any URL here.

Select background image

You can also select a background image that will display in the suite bar across the top.  This image needs to be jpg, .png, or .gif format.   It can be a maximum of 1366 x 50 pixels and cannot be larger than 15 KB.

Preserve your theme settings tenant-wide

You can prevent users from overriding custom theming with their own theme by checking the box.  If you leave the box un-checked, that will allow users to set their own themes.

Set custom colors

You can set accent colors, navigation bar background, and colors of text, icons, and app the launcher icon.  You can enter hexadecimal codes, or RGB numbers directly if you know them (ask your Marketing department), or you can use a color slider/selector to pick the colors.

Display User Name

One of the newest settings, allows you to choose whether or not you want to show the logged in user’s full name near their profile picture. Simply turn this “On” or “Off” for all users.

showusername

It’s quick and easy to configure the theme settings and make your Office 365 environment feel like home!

O365, SharePoint Sites

SharePoint Super-Secret Site Template

Heather Betzhold

You’ve added apps and pages, you’ve laid things out just how you want them. You’ve toiled for hours. You’ve created the perfect site! You are ready to create your site template so you can stamp it out for all your sites and save yourself some time.

Simple, right!?!

Create a Site Template

  1. Go to the site which you want to use as a template.
  2. Click the “gear” and click “Site Settings” (or, “site information” and then access advanced site settings from there)
  3. You’re looking for “Save site as template”

…but it’s not there? Where did it go?

“Save as site template” is missing! AAAAAHH!!!

 

shark
Don’t worry, it’s not as bad as your curling team’s encounter with JAWS!

 

Chances are you have publishing features active on the site collection. The “save site as template” link may be gone, but you can still access the functionality if you really need to. This is where the “super-secret” (well, not really*) site template link comes in.

*It’s not really a secret…you can probably find this info in at least a hundred blogs out there already. I just decided to save myself some time and put it in my own blog so I don’t have to search next time I need to do it.

Create a Site Template – Take 2

  1. Go to the site which you want to use as a template.
  2. Click the “gear” and click “Site Settings” (or, “site information” and then access advanced site settings from there)
  3. Publishing features are active on the site collection, so you will need to proceed to the save template link by entering it at the end of the URL manually.**

Simply copy and paste /_layouts/15/savetmpl.aspx as the end of the site URL once you are on the site you want to make into a template.

https://hkbetz24.sharepoint.com/XXX-XXX/_layouts/15/savetmpl.aspx (where XXX-XXX is the specific site or subsite string)

For example, the URL will look like this if you want to make a template out of the Products site: https://hkbetz24.sharepoint.com/sites/products/_layouts/15/savetmpl.aspx

  1. Complete the following items:
    1. File Name (avoid using spaces or special characters)
    2. Template name (what your admin users will choose from when creating a new site)
    3. Template description
    4. Include Content (y/n) (This is helpful if you have documents or files you want included with every site)
  2. Click “OK”
  3. The new site will be created

**If publishing features are not active, a link to “Save Site as Template” will be visible on the “Site Settings” page.

Note: I’m writing this with O365 SharePoint in mind, but you can do the same thing for other versions of SharePoint.  ” /_layouts/15/savetmpl.aspx ” for SharePoint 2013, 2016 and online. For SharePoint 2010 its simply ” /_layouts/savetmpl.aspx”.

Also note: I’ve run into some people who use this a lot, and others who like to steer away from site templates completely when using SharePoint Online.  That’s a discussion for another day. 🙂