We had an interesting request on a recent project. Our UX designer Emily had come up with a very nice, simple design for the clients new SharePoint site. The design goal was to reduce the complexity of the UI for high level execs who had a specific need for the site. Emily’s design hit this on the head. For the exec assistants however, they needed to see original SharePoint in all it’s glory for the same site.
So we needed away of showing a branded site to some users, and a non branded version to other users.
The solution we adopted was pretty simple in the end: We will create a SharePoint group, called CustomBrand say. Any user in that group will get the branded site, any user not in the group will not.
To implement the brand switching we will do the following:
- Create a HTTPModule which will intercept every request going to the SharePoint site
- For each request, check if the user making the request is in the CustomBrand group
- If they are, apply the custombrand by setting a custom masterpage, otherwise do nothing