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Light Side or Dark Side? Personalize Dynamics CRM 2015 with Themes

Post Author: Joe D365 |

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015 Online - Update 1 introduced a brand new feature, CRM Themes. With Themes, organizations have the ability to uniquely brand their CRM system using colors, imagery, and more! Themes are one of the Top 10 feature released with Dynamics CRM 2015 Online – Update 1, and in today's blog, we will show you how to use this exciting tool!

You can access the CRM Themes feature by navigating to Application > Ribbon Settings > Customizations > Themes.

CRM Themes

CRM Themes

How to Create, Update, Preview and Publish Themes in CRM

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015 Online - Update 1 gives you the flexibility to create multiple themes. Each record under the themes entity represents the different themes you have in CRM and lets you publish any of the themes at any time as well as set your default theme.

As you can see from the screenshot below, CRM comes with a default theme out-of-the-box. The CRM Default Theme cannot be modified, so in order to make thematic changes to your CRM, you need to create a new theme and modify those as desired.

CRM Themes

New Theme Records: New Theme records default to black (color HTML code #000000) for all of the elements. You can change the color by modifying the color code with any HTML color code.

Previewing a Theme: Exit Preview button on the Theme entity.

Publishing a Theme: You can publish your theme by navigating to the Theme grid level and clicking the Publish Theme button in the ribbon or you can publish it directly from the theme form itself.

Exploring Individual Elements for Theme Customizations

Logos: Easily brand your CRM system by selecting an organizational-specific image or logo to display in top left navigation bar of CRM.

CRM Themes
CRM Themes

Logo Tooltip: The Logo Tooltip lets you change the default Microsoft Dynamics CRM logo to match the corresponding logo tooltip.

CRM Themes

Navigation Bar Color: Change the color of your navigation ribbon throughout the application.

CRM Themes

Navigation Bar Shelf Color: Change the background color of your navigation dropdown menu.

CRM Themes

Header Color: You can change the color of your CRM headers in two places, the header text in the main navigation bar and the color of tab headers in CRM forms/records as shown in the images below.

CRM Themes

CRM Themes

CRM Themes

User Interface Elements

Global Link Color: Change the color of all hyperlinks in CRM.

CRM Themes

CRM Themes

CRM Themes

Selected Link Effects: Change the color of a record when it is selected at the grid level.

CRM Themes

Hover Link Effect: The Hover Link Effect changes the color that is displayed when your cursor hovers over a record in a grid.

CRM Themes

You can see how this looks in the image below:

CRM Themes

Process Control Color: Change the color of Business Process Flow stages.

CRM Themes

Default Entity Color: Change the color of CRM out-of-the-box entities.

CRM Themes

In the screen shots below, you can see we changed the default blue color for out-of-the-box entities to dark green instead.

CRM Themes

CRM Themes

Default Custom Entity Color: Set the color of your default custom entities.

CRM Themes

CRM Themes

Control Shade and Control Border: These setting let you change the color that of control fields on a CRM form while your cursor hovers over them.

CRM Themes

CRM Themes

Below is an overview of all the theme settings we have modified in this post.

CRM Themes

As you can see, the possibilities are endless, so get creative and give CRM themes a try for yourself! Themes are only available for Dynamics CRM 2015 Online. Learn more about Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015 on our website. Thanks for stopping by the blog today, readers!

Happy CRM'ing!

Joe CRM
By Joe D365
Joe D365 is a Microsoft Dynamics 365 superhero who runs on pure Dynamics adrenaline. As the face of PowerObjects, Joe D365’s mission is to reveal innovative ways to use Dynamics 365 and bring the application to more businesses and organizations around the world.

One comment on “Light Side or Dark Side? Personalize Dynamics CRM 2015 with Themes”

  1. Hi and thanks for this blog post! One more question to that: Can I Change the "global Navigation color" (e.g. "Sales", "Marketing", "Services", ...) as well?

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