RSMUS.comMicrosoft has officially begun to roll out its suite of new features for Teams Premium. This new toolset brings a refreshing glimpse into how our modern collaboration tools continue to evolve to accommodate the growing hybrid workforce.
This blog post is the second entry in our ongoing Teams Premium series. See part one: “All About Your Meetings – Intelligent Recap”. Each installment of this miniseries will focus on and delve into a specific Teams Premium feature. Today, we will be covering how to set custom themes for your Teams environment, as well as how to “Build Your Brand” with Teams Premium!
Why Utilize Meeting Branding?
Prioritizing your organization’s brand helps establish an identity for your business. Firms everywhere have the opportunity to make their Teams environment feel customized, personalized, and tailored towards their own organization. Enabling a collaboration platform such as Teams with your company’s unique identity help can help to develop and enrich your brand across your workforce.
What’s Needed to Customize My Organization’s Teams?
- A Microsoft 365 account with a Teams Premium license and Teams Admin access
- This is crucial if you want to follow the proceeding steps!
- Your organization’s logo
- A background image for the meeting lobby – branded for your organization
- The colorway for your organization (hex color codes work great for specifics!)
With these items, you can embed your branded theme across your entire Teams environment!
Building Your Brand (Policy) In Teams
- A few things to note before we get started:
- To utilize branding policies put in place, users must be licensed.
- Unlicensed users will not see the branding come across their Teams environment.
- Make sure your policy has a memorable name in case it needs to be referenced later.
- To utilize branding policies put in place, users must be licensed.
- To inject your custom brand into your Teams environment, first head to the Teams Admin Center.
- Under the Meetings pane, select Customization Policies.
- Here is a link to take you directly there: https://admin.teams.microsoft.com/policies/branding/
- Click the + Add button to begin creating a new Customization Policy.
- Once in the Policy Creation menu, begin by adding a name to your brand policy just above Customize meeting images.
- From here, you can start to add in the branding items gathered prior to entering the Admin Center.
- Select the Add a Theme button and add your brand materials:
- Logos: You have the option to select either the dark theme or light theme for accessibility needs.
- Background/Lobby Images: Once again, a dark or light theme can be applied here.
- Color: This is where you will apply your organization’s primary hex color code.
- Once the theme components are added, you can preview your current theme and select Apply to finish making edits.
- *Tip: Remember to Save your theme after creating it!
Assigning The New Policy
Now it’s time to put your new theme to use! The first step is to assign users or groups to the new custom theme policy.
- Begin by selecting your policy and click the Assign users button to manage users with the policy.
- Add as many or as few users as you wish.
- Click Apply to add the list of users/groups
- The policy is now set for the users you selected, and you should see the final theme come across within a matter of a few moments!
- Here is an example of our custom branding policy we just created within a new meeting lobby!
- *Tip: If you don’t want to assign specific users to a customization policy, you can change the Global (Org-wide default) policy to be automatically assigned to all users!
To Summarize
Building your brand within your Microsoft Teams environment encourages better engagement across your workforce and helps drive the adoption of modern collaboration. By adding these types of policies, you can personalize and customize your M365 suite. In just a few minutes, you can enhance your Microsoft Teams application for your end users and bring a splash of color to the workday!
In the next entry of our Teams Premium Mini-Series, we will cover how to transform your Webinars into exciting live events – stay tuned!
Contact us
To reach out to Kaleb Dombeck or another RSM expert to learn more about Teams, Teams Premium, or Microsoft 365, please use our bookings link.
Kaleb Dombeck
Kaleb is a Microsoft Adoption Trainer within the RSM Modern Work team. He has a focus in bringing Microsoft Teams and Power Platform solutions to clients and assisting end-users with embracing these new transformations.
