I recently stumbled across a great blog post by Wictor Wilen on how to customize the Suite Bar Branding Element HTML on the Central Administration Web Application in SharePoint 2013. If you’re not familiar with this, we’re basically talking about the area at the top left of the SharePoint 2013 user interface:

By default, it will just say “SharePoint”. While that’s fine for out of the box folks, this can be a great spot for a little customization. It’s also possible to do this on content web applications, not just Central Administration – and I think this could be a good place to provide a description of the web application. It could also serve as a good place for a hyperlink to always allow the user to get back to the root site – sort of like the Portal Site Connection functionality…

While Wictor’s code was great as a starter point, I thought it would be cool to tweak this a little bit by making it a reusable function and also by allowing the HTML to include a hyperlink to the root site collection in the web application. I simply took his code and modified it to make it a little more reusable, and to also allow for the hyperlink functionality. I also included a custom CSS class name on the A tag to allow for easy branding in your custom solutions.

As for how it works, I’ve provided 3 parameters – 2 of which are required. The required parameters are WebAppUrl and Text; meaning you must provide the link to the web application you want to modify and you must provide the text value you want to replace the out of the box value with. Optionally, you can include a third switch parameter for SetTextAsHyperlink. By including this, you’re sipmly telling the PowerShell function to also make the text a hyperlink to the URL of the web application you are modifying.

Here is the PowerShell function:

function Set-SPSuiteBarBrandingElement {
[CmdletBinding()]
Param(
[Parameter(Mandatory=$true)][System.String]$WebAppUrl,
[Parameter(Mandatory=$true)][System.String]$Text,
[Parameter(Mandatory=$false)][Switch]$SetTextAsHyperlink
)
Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
$webApp = Get-SPWebApplication $WebAppUrl
if($SetTextAsHyperLink)
{
    $html = "<div class='ms-core-brandingText'><a class='customSuiteLink' href='$WebAppUrl'>"+$Text+"</a></div>"
}
else
{
    $html = "<div class='ms-core-brandingText'>"+$Text+"</div>"
}
$webApp.SuiteBarBrandingElementHtml = $html
$webApp.Update()
}

To run it, first dot-source the function and then run it like so – example provided below is for my local VM:

Set-SPSuiteBarBrandingElement -WebAppUrl http://sp2013.intranet.adventureworks.com -Text 'AdventureWorks Intranet'

This should give you something like this:

Optionally, to make the text a hyperlink – run it like so. Notice that when hovering over it’s now a link – pretty cool!

Set-SPSuiteBarBrandingElement -WebAppUrl http://sp2013.intranet.adventureworks.com -Text 'AdventureWorks Intranet' -SetTextAsHyperlink

One last thing I wanted to mention is that in the function above, I’m setting the class of the Anchor tag to “customSuiteLink”. This means if you’re using custom branding, you can reference this CSS class to apply different branding to the link.

Thanks again to Wictor for sharing this!

RD