How to style the DocRead web parts to meet Corporate branding requirements

The best way to accomplish this will be to change the default style sheet provided with DocRead. The rest of this post will take you through the steps required to accomplish this. To follow these steps you will need to be an administrator on all web front end servers on your farm.

1. Connect to one of your web front end servers.
2. Navigate to “[SharePoint Root \TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS\CollaborisReadership\Skins”
3. Create a new folder (you can use the name of your company as the title).
4. Copy the contents of the “default” folder  (located under “[SharePoint Root]\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS\CollaborisReadership\Skins”) and paste the contents into the newly created folder.
5. Now just change the styles under default.css (if you are using SharePoint 2007) or Default2010.css (if you are using SharePoint 2010) to match your corporate branding.
6. Now you need to tell the DocRead Web Parts to start to use the new styles. Navigate to the SharePoint Central Administration home page and select “Global settings” under the “DocRead Configuration Settings” group.
7. At the bottom of the page, use the “Skin Override” dropdown to select the folder that you created in step 3.
8. The DocRead Web Parts cache the name of skin selected above for 15 minutes. If you do not want to wait then you will need to do an IISRESET on your web front end server.
9. All the above steps will need to be repeated on each web front end server.

We strongly recommend that, once you finish creating your styles, you create a SharePoint Solution Package (WSP) that will automatically deploy the contents of your customised styles folder to all of your SharePoint servers (thus eliminating the need of point 9).

If you wish us to do all the branding for you our technical team will be pleased to assist you via a consultancy engagement.