We had a request to change the icon in the browser tabs and address bar for a SharePoint site from the “Weeble People” default icon to our organization’s logo. This logo is round, and the user requested that any white space around the logo be made transparent, similar to the Internet Explorer default icon.
I’m no branding expert. The fact that the change must be replicated on all WFEs makes me guess that there is likely a more elegant solution using CSS and master pages and other web designer magicalness. And glitter. Lots of glitter.
Anyway, here are the steps to an admin hack that got the job done:
- Create a favicon ico file from your logo. A free generator (http://www.favicon.cc ) can create an ico file from other picture file formats (jpg, png, etc). Be aware that the number of pixels is limited, so a scaled down, less detailed logo works best.
- After uploading your file, you can use the Transparent Tool to remove any undesired background.
- Name your new file favicon.ico.
- Locate the existing favicon.ico file in the 14 hive:
C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\TEMPLATE\IMAGES
- Rename the existing file and copy your new favicon.ico file to this location.
- Repeat the file renaming and pasting on each WFE server.
- Wait.
- Wait. Seriously, it takes a bit for the change to show up. Clearing your browser history (including unchecking the IE option to retain data from favorite sites) and restarting IIS may help, but it still took up to an hour in my environment. [Anyone with suggestions to speed this up? I’m all ears!]
Note: This changes the icon for the root site and all sub sites.
May 31st, 2011 at 8:42 pm
Great info, thanks for writing it up so a non-dev can understand it.
August 31st, 2011 at 6:39 am
Exactly what I was looking for.
Thank you!
October 19th, 2011 at 1:18 pm
alternate way :
http://blog.techgalaxy.net/archives/3059
June 15th, 2012 at 10:29 am
These changes occured on the server machine browser but yet to be displayed on the client machine browsers..
June 15th, 2012 at 1:18 pm
Boye, the client machines may be using a cached version of the icon. Try clearing the cache on the client machines. This article gives user-friendly instructions for different browsers. http://www.wikihow.com/Clear-Your-Browser's-Cache. You might also want to clear the cache on the SharePoint server (a task that is good to perform periodically for a variety of reasons). This article gives the manual steps and alternately provides a PowerShell option to do this. http://nickhobbs.wordpress.com/2012/06/
Good luck!
June 15th, 2012 at 1:47 pm
It works fine now, thanks for the post. I’ve had this on my mind for a while just didnt know how to do it. Thanks again
September 28th, 2012 at 8:24 am
Nice and easy tutorial, thank you.