Recently, CapTech was asked to support the program management office (PMO) for a leading mortgage sourcing and servicing provider. The client was embarking on a multi-year (and $MM) program and needed a qualified group of resources to manage and track the overall program delivery. Our initial responsibilities were to determine the PMO guidelines and, specifically, which tool would offer a collaborative platform between our team and the major stakeholders, such as the project managers (PMs).

Our team ultimately settled on SharePoint 2007 for a number of reasons. Known mostly as a document management platform, this tool can be leveraged to document information through its variety of features such as lists and team sites.

Branding Overview

Today I am going to give a high level overview of branding SharePoint 2007.  First, I will give a short description of each of the core elements of a SharePoint brand, and then I will briefly outline how to create a consistent brand across a SharePoint website. 

Custom branding SharePoint is an undertaking that will require significant time and resources to plan, design, develop, and implement.  For our purposes, a basic/core SharePoint brand is composed of Master Pages, Layout Pages, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), Item Styles, Themes, and Features.  Several factors including the website’s scope, best practices, amount of customization required, and maintainability should be considered when planning how best to design and implement a SharePoint brand.  Below is a brief explanation of each part of a SharePoint brand:

• The Master Page is a container