After the Service Manager HTML5 portal is deployed, there is typically a need to customize the look and feel of the portal. One of the many benefits of this new portal versus the old Silverlight portal is that it is easier to customize.
Customizing the portal consists of officially supported customizations and customizations that can be done, but are not officially supported. In this recipe, we will cover just the basic supported customization.
The main difference between the officially supported customizations and other types of customizations is that the official ones are guaranteed by Microsoft and will stay intact through updates and upgrades. Any customizations not on the official supported list may not survive an update or upgrade, therefore it is critical to back them up.
Here is a link to Microsoft's blog on the officially supported customizations:
Now let's explore some recipes on customizing the HTML5 portal.
Make sure that Service Manager is up and running, the HTML5 portal is installed, and that you are using an account that has the administrator role in Service Manager as well as a local administrator on the web server.
There are many customizations you can make to the new HTML5 portal. We will list the most common customizations.
For general customizations such as title, logo, number, and e-mail, you will need to edit the web.config file:
- Find the section:
<!- Customizable fields starts here ->
- To change the title of the portal (seen at the top along the default blue bar as Self-Service Portal), find the following:
<add key="CompanyName" value=" Self-Service Portal"/> - Change the value text to something that your end users will identify with, for example, "IT Service Desk Portal".
- To change the logo of the portal (seen at the top left of the default blue bar as the Microsoft Logo by default), find the following:
<add key=" CompanyLogoLocation" value="../Content/images/Logo_Transparent.png"/> - Change the value text to point at the location of a PNG image file containing the logo you wish to display in the portal.
The company logo image works best as a 32×32 image.
All images are stored in: c:inetpubwwwrootSelfServicePortalContentimages if using the default installation path.
- To change the phone number displayed to users in the portal to ring for assistance (seen at the bottom of the side panel fly out), find the following:
<add key="ITPhone" value="612-532-4143″/> - Change the value text to the phone number you wish to display in the portal.
- To change the e-mail address displayed to users in the portal to use for assistance (seen at the bottom of the side panel fly out), find the following:
<add key="ITEmail" value="[email protected]"/> - Change the value text to the e-mail address you wish to display in the portal.
These easy, general customizations are the main ones supported by Microsoft and are all contained within the single web.config file.
They are the first ones to start with and they enable a quick and easy customization of the portal to make it feel more like it belongs within your organization.