By Matthew McBride
One of the more common questions we receive about
Extranet Collaboration Manager is how to change the wording on the Sign In page
for using Windows Authentication:
The proprietary pages in the ExCM 2010 SharePoint Extranet solution are very “vanilla” by default, so we
often have customers who want to customize the branding, wording, etc. The
fields on the Registration Page can be changed rather easily either through the
User Interface (UI) at the Site Collection level, or in the content site
web.config file at the global level. However, changing the wording on the Sign
In Page is a little more involved.
Our clients often want to use something more
descriptive for their employees like, “ACME Employees Click Here To Sign In.”
To achieve this, the first thing you need to do
is make a copy of the existing page and place it in a new folder. We typically
call this the “Organization Layout Directory” because it’s simply creating a
new folder under the “14\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS” directory that we can use for
customized pages. To do this you need to navigate to the following:
C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft
Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS
Once there, click on “New Folder” and then give
it a name:
Next, you need to make a copy of the existing
page and place it in your new folder. To do that, navigate to:
C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft
Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS\SPSolutions\ExCM
Now you need to find the page you want to customize
and copy it. In our case, it will be the “SignIn.aspx” page:
After copying the page, paste it in the new
Organization Layouts Directory:
Now you can edit your page using Notepad or
another editor. The wording you are looking for is roughly half way down. As
mentioned earlier, you want to change the wording to “ACME Employees Click Here
To Sign In.” To do this, add text to two areas in the file:
The first command simply hides your existing
“Sign In Using Windows Authentication” link, and the second adds your custom
text. The “padding” tag moves the text down and away from the “Sign In” button
for aesthetic reasons.
Once the file is saved, change the location of
the custom Sign In Page within Central Administration. To do this, click on
“Manage Web Applications,” choose your Web Application and then select
“Authentication Providers” from the top ribbon area. Now, click on your zone (I
only have the single Default one):
Now scroll down the area where you will define
the path for your Sign In page. In our example here, we created our
Organizational Layouts directory under the Layouts folder, so we'll only need
to add “ACME” between “\_layouts” and “\signin.aspx,” thus replacing the
“\spsolutions\excm” portion:
Now you just need to save your settings and bring
up the new Sign In page:
Of course, you can customize many other areas as
well depending on your organizational needs, but the process as a whole will be
very similar to this.
