In the context of an internal SharePoint solution I think that branding, in any more detail than basic colour and logo could be considered as a waste of investment.
I question whether an organisation can justify the investment required for awesome branding based upon the following questions:
- Does it help the organisation move towards its vision?
- What is the ROI of the branding work?
- Does the branding deliver clear and measurable business value?
- Does branding support and encourage user adoption?
Discuss….
Branding in SharePoint delivers a couple of functions. It also depends on the use case of SharePoint Server. I think it started from collaboration and through the massive publishing functions SharePoint 2013 has become an internal communication tool too.
Branding helps organizations the raise the brand awareness of the employees and to identify more with the organization. I talk a lot to internal communications departments and they love to have their intranets branded.
It’s true that we don’t brand word but we brand word template for internal and external communication. Branding means not to style or redesign the overall behavior of SharePoint but how to present the content.
Branding to me is a great option for organizations and a great risk too. Branding made by the wrong people can be risky.
- Don’t expect to get a branding for your intranet done better by someone that doesn’t know SharePoint
Then you better stay with logo, colors and fonts. Maybe background images.
(If seen a lot fixed with brandings, that shrinks the ribbon or doesn’t meet the intention of the site) - Don’t think to be smarter than Microsoft and change the core usability concepts.
(I think Microsoft invests a lot in usability testing) - Think about to define color codes for the purpose and not strictly force every page to look the same.
(This one comes more from architecture – define a color code system for projects, intranet, …)
From the ROI perspective. Most companies currently have intranet mostly based on old school pure web content management systems. At least SharePoint should look better then your old intranet. It’s hard to argue with the management we removed your intranet but instead you have SharePoint. (I hope you know what I mean).
Business value. Well let’s pick one example. The rich text editor is technically good but needs adoptions to the content. For example user can read content better if the line height is not 100% but between 125% and 150%. This is one of the things that improves the usability of wikis, blogs, etc and is also part of branding to me.
Do branding supports and encourage user adoptions. There are many things you can do to help the user to produce content for the intranet.
Sorry for my wild thoughts but there are so many different aspects of branding that needs to be considered.
