Managing access: Troubleshooting Brand Kits, slide banks and OALs

You may have just finished reading our AI white paper Brand-ish, and full of hope and excitement, decided to set up your own brand kit (we don’t blame you). You may also be trying to set up your Organisation Asset Library (OAL) in SharePoint, to streamline brand content delivery to your users. And while neither of these things are overly complex, you may suddenly hit a snag when one of your colleagues drops by your desk and asks “Can we make sure we restrict access to this particular template? I don’t want Finance to get access to the nice Marketing slides”.

And suddenly, what sounded like a nice, productive afternoon turns into a nightmare, as you try to figure out permissions and access across a range of Microsoft services (we’ve been there. We know the pain). While we can’t quite help you resolve the beef between your Finance and Marketing departments, we can help you figure out the best way to manage access to your brand assets.

If you’re not planning to use Copilot and Brand Kits, not to worry. The OAL section can still be helpful to you.

In order to make our explanations easier to understand throughout this article, we’ll use a dummy organisation: Orca Group. This company has a main PowerPoint template, shared with all departments. With this comes a set of icons and brand photography. Additionally, the Marketing department has a separate template – and associated assets – that is only to be used for external-facing materials (henceforth called the Marketing Template).

Step 1: Organisation Asset Libraries

Whether you decide to leverage Copilot’s Brand Kit or not, setting up an Organisation Asset Library can be a great first step to help with brand adherence in your company. Although it may look – and act – like any other SharePoint site, an OAL has some superpowers that make life easier (once enabled by your IT team). Any Office templates or images that you add in there will be accessible through your Office applications’ user interface, making it a simple and cost-effective content delivery network (especially if you don’t want to invest into a third-party solution).

We won’t get into the nitty-gritty of setting up an OAL in this specific article (there’s a lot of great guidance in Microsoft’s own help pages), but rather focus on how you might want to manage access if you are dealing with different templates and associated assets.

There are two types of document libraries you can set up in an OAL:

• A template-type library, which will hold Office templates (.potx, .dotx, .xltx). If you decide to leverage Copilot’s brand kit capabilities, this is also where you can host your slide bank.
• An image-type library, which holds any kind of visual assets, like brand photography, logos, or icon sets.

You can’t mix and match – for example putting images in the template library or vice-versa. OAL sites are limited to 30 different document libraries, so what this means in practice is that you can only have 15 different brands available there. But to be fair, we’ve not quite met an organisation yet that has more than 15 different brand identities.

Aside from this small distinction about document library types, OALs behave like any other SharePoint site, which means you can be quite granular in how you set up your permissions. As long as you grant all your users “Read” access to the OAL site, they will be able to access the templates and pictures in Office apps, but won’t be able to modify them in SharePoint. Edit permissions can be granted to a small subset of users, typically your marketing or brand department, which will allow them to update the template, or add more icons.

These permissions set at the site level can also be broken, if you need to restrict a specific folder to a subset of users. To go back to our example at the beginning with the feuding Marketing and Financial departments at Orca Group, the most optimal way to set up their OAL would be as follows:

• Orca Group Office Templates Library – Read access for all users (inherited permissions)
• Orca Group Picture Library – Read access for all users (inherited permissions)
• Orca Group Marketing Office Templates Library – Read access for Marketing (custom permissions)
• Orca Group Marketing Picture Library – Read access for Marketing (custom permissions)

This ensures that only Marketing can access their specific template and assets, while both Marketing and Financial can access the organisation template.

Once you’ve set it all up, you have a choice. You can either just use your OAL as is, or you can decide to enable it to be linked to Copilot, and leverage its content for your brand kit. If you opt for the latter option, your IT team will need to do some more magic in the background to make your OAL libraries Copilot-searchable.

Step 2: Slide banks

Now let’s throw Copilot into the mix. Before you even set up your Brand Kit (or Kits, if you have several distinct brands), you should think about how you’re going to build and segment your slide bank. You can read more about what does into a slide bank in our white paper.

Copilot will consider any slides in a slide bank fair game to re-use and modify, which means that if you have any department- or business unit-specific slides, you probably shouldn’t group them all into one document shared with your entire organisation. The same goes for templates in a specific format or language.

On the one hand, this means more files to maintain for your brand department, but on the other this will ensure that you can be granular in delivering content to specific teams, while also keeping everything in one location (your OAL).

To illustrate how to best approach this, we’ll take a little trip back to Orca Group. Now that they have set up their OALs properly, this is how they should set up their slide banks, to ensure that there’s the equivalent of the Berlin Wall around Marketing’s prized slides:

• Orca Group Slide Bank – shared and usable company-wide, with layouts relevant for all departments.
• Orca Group Marketing Slide Bank – only shared with the Marketing department.

Both slide banks should then be placed in their respective template library in the OAL site. This will ensure that the content is only delivered to the users who have access to those libraries.

Step 3: Brand Kits

Armed with your OAL and slide bank, you are now feeling more than ready to set up your Brand Kit. We know what that excitement feels like. However, before you dive in headfirst, we thought it best to impart some wisdom and knowledge.

Brand Kits come in two flavours, and it all comes down to access. In practice, all M365 users with a paid Copilot license are able to create a Brand Kit in the Copilot app. That Brand Kit can be shared with specific users or groups, either with view or edit permissions. M365 users on a basic Copilot license will be able to use Brand Kits in Office apps, but won’t be able to view or edit them in the M365 Copilot chat app.

While this approach works for small scale teams, it’s not the ideal delivery method for a Brand Kit if you’re targeting your entire organisation. But, fear not, Microsoft has thought of this.

In order to publish a Brand Kit and make it available to all your users by default, your IT department will need to appoint one (or a few) Enterprise Brand Manager, typically someone in charge of your brand, or someone from marketing. Once in possession of this lofty title, the brand manager will be able to build the Brand Kit from scratch, linking elements from the OAL directly, and publishing it so that it’s accessible to the whole company. Only Enterprise Brand Managers retain editing rights over the Brand Kit, even once it’s shared.

Back at Orca Group, let’s look at how we would set their Brand Kits up for success. There are actually two options, and the choice really depends on how disciplined your users are.

Option A:

They create a single org-wide Brand Kit: Orca Group Brand Kit. Shared with all users by default, it contains two slide banks:

• Orca Group Slide Bank – linked from the Orca Group Office Templates OAL. This means it will be available to all users.
• Orca Group Marketing Slide Bank – linked from the Orca Group Marketing Office Templates OAL. While the slide bank may show for all users, only employees who have access to the Marketing OAL will be able to use it.

This is the quicker option – you create and manage one Brand Kit, and then have different slide banks targeting specific departments. However, the issue you may run into is that even though users may not have direct access to a specific slide bank (the Marketing one), Copilot will still offer it up as an option to users when it starts creating slides. If an unsuspecting user from Financial clicks on the wrong slide bank, then the Copilot prompt will fail, as it can’t retrieve the file. Access is ultimately protected, but the user experience isn’t ideal.

Option B:

To avoid this specific issue, Orca Group could decide to create two different Brand Kits:

• Orca Group Brand Kit: shared org-wide, with the slide bank and content linked from the relevant OAL folders: Orca Group Office Templates and Orca Group Picture Library.
• Orca Group Marketing Brand Kit: created by the Marketing team directly, and shared with their specific users. It contains the slide bank and content linked from the relevant OAL folders: Orca Group Marketing Office Templates and Orca Group Marketing Picture Library.

This approach works better if you really want to segregate certain slide banks away from org-wide use. The drawback is that you then need to maintain two different Brand Kits. If your brand is well-established and doesn’t change much, then this should be manageable. The other point to note is that users will need to select the right Brand Kit to have access to the specific slide bank they require, which may need some initial training.

What’s next?

If you’re deep into OALs and Brand Kit permissions, chances are you’re figuring out how to get this to work for your organisation. But it’s tricky – it’s a lot to navigate. Which is why we help organisations like yours get it right first time. If that sounds like just the thing you need, you can learn more here.