Are you an organization that brands your corporate intranet ? If so, how far do you go :
- Customer logo and theme ?
- Full on new master pages, new CSS – you can barely tell it’s SharePoint ?
Really interested to know peoples thoughts. I can see the benefit for branding external facing, but internal is it worth the cost and effort (and potential upgrade issues) ?
Hi Mark,
In the beginning I did a logo and perhaps some color replacements and the customers where satisfied. But after we got some developers (IT Pro and business consulting myself) we made some complete branding packages (masterpages, CSS, new graphics etc.) and the customers where thrilled.
The cost of a branding package depends on how much the customers need. And that is the question: “How much branding is needed on an intranet?”. In my experience the users really adopts the intranet way a lot faster when the design is appealing and just looks great. -please try adding a design package to an intranet you know already and I think you can confirm this also. There are some good packages out there you can try out or even get for free these days.
Regarding the upgrades – yes, the branding package needs to be adjusted but Microsoft did a good job making this somewhat easy. It is not from scratch this time 🙂
I thought NewsGator was good as it’s service applications right inside SharePoint.  The activity stream is very good and slightly better than SP13 one.  There are some lovely additional features like turning an answered question stream into a permanent wiki with all data intact.  NewsGator has a nice feature called Lookout which pulls all your content into one page like little widgets.  Some of my fav features are:
- Gamification, awesome badges and proper weights to meet targets, Global or community level
- Broadcast, a way to post a comment to every activity stream on users mysite.
- Kudos, allows any user at any time to well give another user kudos
As with everything though it depends on what your looking for, the company i worked for at the time wanted an on premise product which wasn’t Yammer.  The Yammer presentation we had was rather disappointing tbh, very poor SharePoint compatibility. Â
Looks like Newsgator for SP2013 is alive and well, which is good! http://www.newsgator.com/buzz/news/detail-view/articleid/434/lookout-newsgator-announces-social-sites-3-0-and-sharepoint-2013-compatibility.aspx
Is Newsgator good? I heard good things about it. Does is still have a place in 2013 or has Community Sites  + Yammer killed it ?Â
Stephen Tierney said:
Hey I totally understand the cost impact, although most places I have worked have had In house skill to get what they want from design to implementation. Â
On branding 3rd Party tools, Â I spent a few days branding NewsGator for 2010 which was a bit of a pain in itself but also that backups need to be taken etc before any NewsGator updates are applied. Â
Microsoft Whilst tell you not to customize SharePoint 2013 in the way of application and major gui changes still encourage custom themes and its also alot easier now too.
Hey I totally understand the cost impact, although most places I have worked have had In house skill to get what they want from design to implementation. Â
On branding 3rd Party tools, Â I spent a few days branding NewsGator for 2010 which was a bit of a pain in itself but also that backups need to be taken etc before any NewsGator updates are applied. Â
Microsoft Whilst tell you not to customize SharePoint 2013 in the way of application and major gui changes still encourage custom themes and its also alot easier now too.
