Black Falcon Software: Branding SharePoint Services 2007

Microsoft’s SharePoint Server is probably the finest document management server available on the market.  It has all of the necessary features to allow any sized company to manage their documents across an entire organization or for a single division.  And for those that cannot or do not want afford t he licensing fees of the full server implementation, Microsoft offers their Windows SharePoint Services engine without charge.  Though the sub-set of the full server implementation it nonetheless provides all of the necessary document management services that a company would require.

Due to its growing popularity many IT organizations have been experimenting with customizing their SharePoint services so that it brings a more seamless experience to the user when accessing  services through a corporate portal.  Here is where SharePoint becomes rather weak and completely frustrating.

SharePoint was originally designed to do one thing and one thing well… service document management.  There was little thought on Microsoft’s part to expand this software to do much beyond this.  However, many developers are attempting to do just that.  In response, Microsoft has released tools to aid in th is effort, which includes the recently free version of SharePoint designer 2007.

Unfortunately, most of these tools fall short of being able to provide robust platforms for extending SharePoint and the motley set of documentation that litters the Internet from Microsoft to individual developer efforts at this process has made the entire endeavor more confusing with the feeling that it is one giant “hack”.  In effect it is.  In addition, using SharePoint for processes that it wasn’t really meant to handle such as a semi-replacement for IIS becomes a little ridiculous considering that SharePoint relies on IIS in the first place to serve up its web-pages.

Branding a SharePoint site to bring it in line with corporate interfaces appears to be one of the more popular endeavors in these efforts but again, the documentation is all over the place making researching this process a rather tiresome, if not frustrating ordeal.

Black Falcon Software now brings a little guidance to this aspect of working with SharePoint with its own guide to branding a SharePoint site.  The free download will assist those developers who want or need to brand a SharePoint site with a solid starting point for their efforts as well as give them the areas where further research may be required.

If you like the guide or have suggestions or comments please leave comment with this post or send an email to Black Falcon Software’s support email address… support@blackfalconsoftware.com

Black Falcon

Download SharePoint Branding Guide…