SharePoint design and re-brand
Saturday, October 7th, 2006I recently took part in a 3 month long SharePoint re-brand for a large global resourcing company. The installation is being used worldwide, across many countries and, in addition to SharePoint portal; there are over 60 team sites. We went the whole distance, completely designing and re-branding the entire look and feel, including style sheets, imagery, functionality and templates.
Anyone who has re-branded a SharePoint installation will testify what a difficulty this can be. Microsoft has, once again, ignored important web standards, effective CSS rules (such as inheritance) and even the general principles of templates. Anything other than applying a new theme in Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) - changing style sheets and basic imagery, for instance - is a sizeable task.
That said, the project turned out a huge success. The site looks amazing and is going down very well with its users. And what Microsoft lack in good coding and ease of use, they make up for in enhanced out-of-the-box functionality. SharePoint is a powerful (if sometimes daunting) enterprise-level intranet and extranet solution.
