SharePoint Server 2013: Customize your Central Administration
Once a time Jeff Teper – Senior Vice President for SharePoint said that we should “use SharePoint as an out-of-box application whenever possible. We designed SharePoint [2013's] UI to be clean, simple and fast and work great out-of-box. We encourage you not to modify it, which could add complexity, performance and upgradeability, and to focus your energy on working with users and groups to understand how to use SharePoint to improve productivity and collaboration and identifying and promoting best practices in your organization.”
This is ABSOLUTELY true for intranet or extranet sites. We’ve all seen awful intranet/extranet designs. Flashing lights, animated gifs and so many other things. But thankfully they’re now less common or even disappeared. A corporate Intranet or Extranet should be as simple as possible. This should be even considered a best practice
This is NOT true for Public Facing Internet Sites. Hopefully I guess, because otherwise the world well know SharePoint Public Facing Website should be something like that:
Well, if a customer wants to buy a Ferrari and sees this website, I can guarantee you that he will buy another car. Not professional at all. Everybody is talking about customizing Public facing Internet Web Sites or even intranets, but with this blog post I want to show you how to customize your Central Administration.
Therefore connect to you’re machine and open SharePoint 2013 Central Administration. As you can see the User Interface is very classic and same as all other Central Administrations that you ever saw in your life.
http://gokanx.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/14.png?w=1200&h=958
You can’t see the Design Gallery under the Site Settings of your Central Administration but it’s not forbidden to navigate to it by hitting the** /15/designgallery.aspx** in the browser.
You can now select a predefined template for your Central Administration and hit ok.
http://gokanx.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/23.png?w=1200&h=956
Well look this now. Your Central Administration is now a little bit different. Cool isn’t it ?
If you don’t like the black template you can always navigate to the Design Gallery and select another one.
http://gokanx.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/33.png?w=1200&h=954
To be honnest it’s, still not persoalized enough. What I want is to see is, also my company name on my Central Administrarion and a small logo. Whay not ?
Navigate to the Site Settings and change the Title, Description, Logo and the Quick Launch
http://gokanx.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/43.png?w=1200&h=952
This is now a 100% personalized ( No custom Code ) Central Administration.
If you have many farms and multiple environements you can also image that the Developmment environment should have a « red », the Qualifying a « orange » and the Production environmment a « black » template.
This will help you – visualy altough – remeber where you are and limit the User Error Impact ! A different way of gouvernance :-):-)
http://gokanx.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/53.png?w=1200&h=956
