You can add your own branding to your users Office 365 login screens via the Azure admin portal. The level of customisation that you get depends on the version of Azure Active Directory that you’ve signed up for.

What’s Azure Active Directory?

Azure Active Directory might not sound familiar to you, though it underpins every Office 365 organisation. All of your Office 365 users are stored in your Azure Active Directory, which is included in Office 365.

How to set up the custom branding for Office 365 login screens

1. Login to Office 365 as an administrator at https://portal.office.com
2. Click the App Launcher/Waffle button on the top left of the screen
3. Click the Admin tile
4. On the left menu, scroll down to Azure AD
5. You may need to sign up for an Azure subscription, though you won’t have to put any credit card details in yet.
6. Click Active Directory on the left menu once you’ve signed up.
7. Click the Active Directory that has the same name as your Office 365 subscription, you will likely only have one listed here. Ours is called Ozbizweb Group.
8. Click Configure, then click Customize Branding

The Customize Default Branding section gives you a few options to customise your Office 365 login experience.

Banner Logo

Size: 280 x 60 (Max is 300 x 60)

The Banner logo is the logo that appears above the Office 365 login fields. It supports JPEG, though a PNG image with a transparent background is recommended.

Square Logo

Size: 240 x 240

The square logo is used to represent user accounts in your organisation, on Azure AD web UI and in Windows 10. You should also add this one as a PNG with a transparent background, though JPEG is also supported.

Square Logo, Dark theme

Size: 240 x 240

You can upload a separate image for this one if the previous square logo won’t look good on dark backgrounds. Again, PNG with a transparent is recommended, though JPEG is supported.

User ID Placeholder

Typically, this is [email protected] and is shown in the user ID input field. You can replace this with [email protected] if you like. Though you should leave it blank if you’re making apps using Azure AD that will support external users.

Sign In Page Text Heading

This heading will appear above the customised sign in page text which can appear at the bottom of the Office 365 Sign in screen.

Sign In Page Text Body

This can be a short message at the bottom of the Office 365 login screen that can give more information to the users. You can use this to display welcome text, information about password resets, or contacting the helpdesk. This one can’t be longer than 500 characters (250-300 characters recommended).

Click the arrow to proceed to the next screen. This is where you can add the background image that will appear when a user enters their username.

Sign In Page Illustration

Size: 1420 x 1200

The message from Microsoft here is to use an abstract illustration or picture. Since the image gets resized and cropped, avoid using rasterized text and keep the “interesting” part of the illustration in the top-left corner. It can be a JPEG, GIF or PNG and should be about 300kb in size. Max size is 500kb.

Sign In Background Colour

Certain users may connect to Office 365 on low bandwidth connections, so you can customise the background colour of the Sign In Page Illustration section which will appear while the image loads. The default is the Office 365 orange/red, though this can be set to a hexadecimal colour code that suits your brand eg #73A2D1

Show or Hide Keep me signed in or KMSI

If you don’t want your users to choose to stay signed into devices, you can hide the ‘Keep me signed in’ checkbox here.

Post Logout Link Label

This is the link text that will appear when your users log out of Office 365. eg. Return to Ozbizweb Group website.

Post Logout Link URL

This is the URL that you’d like the Post Logout Link Label to redirect your users too. Eg. http://www.ozbizweb.com.au

Once you’ve applied your changes, click the Tick icon and wait for the changes to be applied.

You can test them out in an In-Private window (CTRL-Shift-P in Edge/Internet Explorer, CTRL-Shift-N in Google Chrome). Just enter your email address, and you should see some of the changes are taking effect. Note that it may take up to an hour to see your branding changes.

The free tier of Azure Active Directory doesn’t appear to display all the customised branding elements. Though some of them, like the Banner Logo and custom background colour before the Sign In Illustration loads, do appear.

Want to see all your Office 365 login screen branding?

Displaying all of your branding changes is one of the many benefits of Azure Active Directory Premium, and the good news is that you can try it out for free. If you decide that you don’t want to go ahead with Azure Active Directory Premium for all your users, and just want it for the branding, you can assign it to just one user. This seems to enable all the custom branding elements for all users in your organisation.

Here’s how to activate an Azure Active Directory Premium Trial

1. In the Azure portal, click the quick start cloud icon.
2. Scroll down to Get Azure AD Premium and click Try it now.
3. Click Activate Trial and the bottom of the screen.
4. Click the tick to get started. This trial will not auto-renew, and you won’t be charged after the 30 days are up.
5. Wait for the trial to start.
6. Make sure the Azure Active Directory Premium plan is selected and click Assign at the bottom of the screen.
7. You will be presented with a list of users in your organisation, mouse over the users and click the + icon to select them for license assignment.
8. Click the tick icon and wait for the License plan operation to complete.
9. Open an In-Private window, navigate to https://portal.office.com and enter a user’s email address. You should see all the branding changes you’ve implemented are now active!