CRM Masthead Customization

David Sutton, 10 May 2010

A discussion here at Magnetism started me wondering if it is possible to add your logo or another image into CRM. After searching on the internet I came across a few solutions to this problem. The solution requires either editing the image files in the CRM directory or changing the .CSS definition.

Please Note:

- You must be making these changes on the server that hosts CRM or you will not be able find the files that are talked about in this blog.

- Any changes made may be lost when updating CRM to newer versions or installing roll ups.

I will be changing the masthead (which is the image below) so that it will show the Magnetism logo on it.

To begin you will need to find the masthead image file, and that is found in the following directory - C:\Program Files\Microsoft CRM Server\CRMWeb\_imgs\

If you are having trouble finding that directory which I did it may also be found in - C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\_imgs\

The Above Links should go directly to the location of the files – The success rate of this may depend on different versions of CRM or different setups.

When you have found a directory that works search down the list of files for a .jpg file named Masthead.jpg’.

Once you have found this I recommend that you make a copy of the file and place it in a safe/different place in case you want to change it back to its original. Now that we have the image open it in an image editor I am using Adobe Photoshop but you can use any other program as this does not require any major adjustments.

When you have it open in an editing program, simply add your logo to the masthead like below:

It is a very simple process and the only thing I did really was to put a line to separate the logos. But this is only a quick way of doing it. If I were to do it properly I would be removing the CRM logo altogether and moving the Magnetism Logo along to replace the CRM logo (which I will be talking about later on in the blog).

To put the changes into action you simply have to save it as the same name (in this case masthead.jpg) and place it in the same file location where you got it, once that has been done you can go back into CRM and it should be updated so that it shows the edited masthead, another thing that you can do is if you have CRM already open is to just refresh or press F5.

Customising Further

To further change the masthead and remove the CRM icon you will have to do this in Photoshop or another editing program. Removing the CRM icon may include placing a new gradient over it, remaking it or using the healing tools (Photoshop tool). Two examples are included below:

The ways that you can customize the visual side of CRM is very broad and most of it can be done very easily and with little trouble. This was just a small glimpse of what you can do.

Just remember this is an unsupported CRM customisation and if you are playing around especially with the .CSS definitions things can go wrong and stuff up so just remember to save copies of the originals so that you can reset the files.