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 change the Office 365 login screen with your own company logo, background and footnote and you can also setup a custom theme for Office 365 self.
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 with recreating the Microsoft Office 365 login screen, so it’s harder for users to detect the 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 at 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.
So let’s get started with branding the Office 365 login screens.
- Login to your Azure Portal
Login to the Azure Portal with a global admin account.
- Go to company branding
Click on the menu (top left corner), select Azure Active Directory and choose Company Branding. Click on configure.
- Upload the sign-page background image
The background image must have an image size of 1920x1080px and be less than 300KB large. If you need to re-size your image. Set the quality to 70% and file type to jpeg.
- Add a banner logo
The banner logo is replacing the Microsoft logo on the password screen. Use a transparent image for this for the best results. Make your logo as big a possible withing the maximum size of 280x60px.
Leave the username empty, but you can add a Sign-in page text with some contact information from your helpdesk. - Advanced settings – Square logo
The logo’s that you can upload under Advanced Settings are only displayed to Windows 10 Enterprise users when they log-in for the first time.
I have set them anyway, you never know what Microsoft will use them for in the future 😉 - Show option remain signed in
Leave this option on yes, because some features of SharePoint online depend on this. If you are not using SharePoint online or Office 2010, then you can safely turn this off.
- Save
Click on save to apply the new settings.
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
- Login to your Office 365 Admin center
- In the admin center, go to settings > settings
- Click on the Organisation profile tab and choose Custom Themes
- 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)
- 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. - You can add an accent color to match your company branding.
- 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.
