Planning customizations and solutions
As with an on-premise installation of SharePoint, SharePoint Online can be heavily modified to suit the requirements of your business users. These modifications can vary in scope from customizations produced for a small grouping of users to solutions that can be applied to major segments of your SharePoint Online environment.
There are three major customization levels present in a SharePoint farm: browser-based, tool-based, and developer-based.
Browser-based customizations
SharePoint users with the appropriate permission level can make customizations to any SharePoint site using nothing more than their web browser. These customizations do not require much technical expertise and are scoped to a particular site or site collection.
Browser-based customizations include the following:
■■ Changing the site theme to one of 18 available themes (“What’s your style?”)
■■ Adding a logo and description to your site (“Your site. Your brand.”)
■■ Editing site pages, choosing customizing the appearance of web parts and other content to be displayed
■■ Altering the global and current navigation elements of a site
■■ Creating and altering the appearance of list and library views
tool-based customizations
Sometimes the modifications available through the browser are not adequate; if the person making the changes is technically adept (but not a software developer), the next available option is using a tool-based customization.
These sorts of modifications are made using SharePoint tools such as InfoPath Designer for developing customized InfoPath forms; SharePoint Designer (SPD) for making more-detailed site modifications such as altering/creating page layouts and creating workflows; or any of the Office 2013 client tools such as Microsoft Access, Microsoft Excel, or Microsoft Visio 2013.
Developer-based customizations
The last option for making modifications to a SharePoint Online installation is to build custom code solutions. Solutions developed using Visual Studio 2012 can be activated on your SharePoint Online installation and run in the site’s sandboxed solution environment.
