Office 365 Branding – Add your Company Branding to Office 365

If you have a paid Office 365 subscription or using other Microsoft Online Services, then you can add your company branding to Office 365. You can change the Office 365 login screen with your own company logo, background, and footnote and you can add a custom theme for Office 365.

Branding your Office 365 login page doesn’t only look nice, it also helps with mitigating phishing attacks to your users.

The attackers are getting better at recreating the Microsoft Office 365 login screen, so it’s harder for users to detect phishing sites. But when you customize it with your company branding, your users would be able to recognize the fake login screens much easier.

Customize the Office 365 login screen

Before we start with how to change it, let’s first take a look at what you can actually change. The company branding will only appear after entering your email address. So the company branding will only be visible on the password and multi-factor authentication page.

In the login screen, we can replace the Microsoft logo, background and add a support footnote to it.

The new login screen will be available to your users immediately. Open a new incognito session in your browser to check the results:

Branding Office 365

So we now got the login customized, but we also want to add our company branding in Office 365 self. In Office 365 we can change the color of the navigation bar and add our logo to it. This is done by creating a custom theme for Office 365.

The default navigation bar looks like this:

To change this you will need to be a global admin in Office 365.

Creating a custom theme

1. Log in to your Office 365 Admin center
   
2. In the admin center, go to settings > settings
   
3. Click on the Organisation profile tab and choose Custom Themes

4. Upload a company logo. I recommend using a PNG file here and a white-colored logo for the best results. You can add a link to the logo if you want (to your companies website for example)
   
5. It’s possible to upload a background image instead of using a solid color for the navigation bar. But it has to be really small and there will be a solid color behind the Microsoft app name (“Microsoft 365 admin center” on this screen).
   
   I have the best experience with using a solid color instead of trying to fit an image in there. Use the navigation bar color for this.
   
6. You can add an accent color to match your company branding.
   
7. And the last steps are if you allow users to override the company theme or not and to show their display name on the top right corner.

The result will look like this:

Users that have already logged in to Office 365 may have to change the theme to see the effect if you have allowed users to override the company theme.

Conclusion

I hope this article helped you with branding your Office 365 tenant. I really recommend that you atleast set a company logo for the Office 365 login screens. This can really help your users to spot phishing sites.

If you have any questions, just drop a comment below.