Customize CRM Logo image and colors...

I've spent a fair bit of time looking for ways to change the CRM header logo and page color... My final conclusion is that it is entirely unsupported by MS. Never the less, it is possible to customize your pages to suit your client/company look and feel.

Note carefully though, that these changes are completely unsupported and may be overwritten by service packs and/or hotfixes in the future.

CRM is essentially just a website with masses of .Net pages and SQL Server as its engine, its very easy to hack its content. Now, I would suggest strongly that you at least take a backup copy of every file you are about to modify or better yet, take a backup of the entire folder BEFORE you start.

Changing the CRM Logo to your company logo...

There generally seems to be multiple copies of files slightly different from one to the other.

The easiest way is to go to your CRM installation's website files, typically C:\Program Files\Microsoft CRM\CRMWeb. This is where all the .Net files and images are stored.

The main logo image is C:\Program Files\Microsoft CRM\CRMWeb\_imgs\masthead.jpg along with masthead_live.jpg, masthead_live_rtl.jpg and masthead_rtl.jpg for various situations. You will also need to modify the file mast_back.gif. This image allows for resizing of the window.

Simply replace these images with your own copies to the same dimensions. and you now have your own branded CRM. That was the easy part.

Alternatively, you could modify the page(eg C:\Program Files\Microsoft CRM\CRMWeb\_common\styles\global-dynamic-styles.css.aspx) that calls these images, but logically, I think it would be safer an easier to just replace the images.

Changing all pages to suit your company's look and feel...

Now you want to change CRM's standard blue, outlook feel to suit your business.

This part of the job is massively time consuming. There are proximately 46 million aspx, css, xml, xsl... files and images within the CRMWeb folder. You need to visit each one individually and change any reference to a color to your own equivalant one. There doesn't seem to be a very good standard of colors used in CRM and you'll notice that there are 46 million slight variations of a similar shade of blue in each file. It almost as if they've done this on purpose to discourage developers from touching it!?!?!?

I suggest that you gather maybe 6 different shades of your own colors and systematically replace each CRM shade of blue. Every change is live upon saving, so you can check the resulting page instantly. Once all web pages have been visited, its time to modify each of the 46 million images(within the _img folder).

You should expect to spend 2-4 days depending on how finely you need it tuned.

NOTE: Occasionally the client browser may not update to recent changes and may need IE temporary files to be cleared.