Appearance & Workspace

Admins can tailor how CompassDocs looks and behaves from Settings → Workspace, which has three pages: Branding, Content and, from 1.16.0, Sign-in page. These settings are stored in the database (not the environment) and apply to everyone.

Branding

Company name — replaces “CompassDocs” in the sidebar, on the sign-in page, in the browser tab title, and in the Ask feature (“Ask Acme”).
Logo — three ways to set it; when set, it replaces the default compass mark everywhere (sidebar, sign-in page, public site):
- Use a website’s icon — type your company site (e.g. yourcompany.com) and CompassDocs fetches its favicon and stores a copy, so it keeps working even if the site changes.
- Upload an image — PNG, JPEG, GIF, WebP, or ICO up to 1 MB; square images look best. (SVG isn’t accepted, for the same script-safety reason as attachments.)
- Image URL — paste a direct link (or data: URL) to a hosted image.
Fetched and uploaded logos live in the uploads volume, are covered by your backups, and apply immediately; Remove logo returns to the compass mark.
Accent color — pick one of the presets or any custom hex, and the whole product re-tints: buttons, links, focus rings, highlights, and subtle surfaces, in both light and dark themes, on the sign-in page (whose default artwork is drawn from it), and on the public site. CompassDocs derives the full light→dark color ramp from your single brand color, so everything stays legible.

A live preview shows how your brand will appear as you type. The sign-in page has its own artwork and text, on the next page.

Settings → Workspace → Sign-in page (1.16.0) designs the page everyone sees before they sign in. On a screen 1024 pixels wide or more the page is a cover (your artwork, or a pattern in your accent color) beside the sign-in form; anything narrower (a phone, most tablets held upright, the full sign-in page opened from the Outlook add-in) shows the cover as a band above the form. The cover carries your logo, your name or headline, a tagline and a caption, and from 1.17.0 any quick links you put there. Everything anyone needs to sign in (the fields, the buttons, errors, help) stays in the form. The first and password steps name your workspace (“to continue to Acme”), and a printed page leaves the cover out and puts your logo and name above the form instead.

Admins, and anyone whose role holds Manage branding, can change it. Changes to the text and layout wait for Save changes (with the usual unsaved-changes guard); uploading or removing artwork applies at once, like the logo. Each upload, removal and save is written to the audit log.

Artwork

Without artwork, the cover is drawn from your accent color: a deep gradient, a faint compass dial and a fine grain, which loads nothing extra and re-tints when the accent changes. To use a photo or an illustration instead, choose Upload image…:

Formats and size. JPEG, PNG, WebP or GIF, up to 15 MB, at least 1280 × 720 pixels and at most 100 megapixels (a bigger picture is refused with its size, however big). Larger is better up to that: 2560 pixels or wider looks sharpest on large monitors, and a narrower picture gets a warning that it may look soft. A landscape picture suits the cover best; a tall one is cropped hard.
What CompassDocs does with it. It re-encodes the picture as WebP at three widths (960, 1600 and 2560 pixels) so phones download the small copy, keeps only the first frame of an animated GIF, and drops location and camera data. The copies live in the uploads volume beside the logo, so your backups cover them; an upload that can’t be saved (a full volume, say) leaves none of them behind, and the current artwork stays. While the picture loads, the page shows its average color and a blurred preview, so nothing jumps.
Keep in view (the focus point). Screens have different shapes, so the cover crops the picture differently on a laptop, an ultrawide and a phone. Click one of the nine points over the thumbnail (or use the arrow keys) to say which part must stay in view: the face, the building, the logo on the wall.
Artwork side: Left (the default) or Right of the form, on screens 1024 pixels and wider. Pick the side that keeps the form away from the picture’s subject.
Show the name and headline over the artwork. On by default. Turn it off when the picture already carries your branding: the cover is then the picture alone (with the quick links bar, if you have any, as the only thing on it), and the form shows your logo and name above it instead.
Replace image… swaps the picture; Remove artwork… asks first, then goes back to the pattern in your accent color and deletes the files.

Text on the artwork

Shown over the cover on screens 1024 pixels and wider; phones show only your logo and name in the band.

Field	Limit	What it is
Headline	60 characters	Set large over the artwork. Leave it blank to show the workspace name. Short headlines are set largest.
Tagline	140 characters	A sentence under the headline.
Caption	80 characters	Small print under the tagline, such as a photo credit.

Text over a photo always sits on a shade that the text draws for itself, so it stays readable on any picture and at any crop: the white text keeps a contrast of at least 5.8:1 even on a pure white photo, and the shade darkens further for visitors who ask their system for more contrast. You don’t need to pick a dark picture or move the text. Line breaks and repeated spaces are removed; a value over its limit is refused, never cut.

Quick links on the artwork

From 1.17.0 the cover can carry up to eight links to the tools people may want before they sign in, such as the IT help desk or the status page. You don’t choose them here: as the hint on this page says, they come from Settings → Links, where you turn on Sign-in page for a link everyone can see (see On the sign-in page). With no such links the cover is unchanged.

On screens 1024 pixels and wider they sit on a frosted bar across the top of the cover, beside your logo: buttons the same height as the logo, each with the link’s icon, lined up on the right. The middle of the cover stays clear for your name, headline and artwork. When there are more links than fit, the row scrolls sideways instead of growing.
On anything narrower they sit in the same buttons on a row at the top of the band above the form, which scrolls sideways; your logo and name stay below it.
Readable on any artwork. The frosted glass lets the picture show through. Over an uploaded photo it is darker, so the white link text stays readable on a bright sky or a white wall. For visitors whose system asks for less transparency or more contrast the glass becomes solid, and with forced colours (Windows high contrast) the links are drawn in the system’s own colours.

The links come after the sign-in form for the keyboard and screen readers, open in a new tab and are left out when the page is printed. The preview shows your real links, and clicking them there isn’t counted in their clicks.

Shown with the sign-in form at every size, on every step.

Field	Limit	What it is
Example email	64 characters	Shown faintly in the empty Email or username field, such as `name@acme.com`, so people know which address to use.
Help text	160 characters	One line under the form, such as who to contact. Left blank, password steps say “Forgot your password? Ask your administrator to reset it.”
Help link	500 characters	An `https://` or `mailto:` address. The help text becomes a link to it (“Get help signing in” when the text is blank); an `https://` link opens in a new tab.

Preview

The Preview card shows the real sign-in page with your unsaved changes, at Laptop (1440 × 900), Ultrawide (3440 × 1440) or Phone (390 × 844) size, in Light or Dark, so what you see is what those screens get. On a wide screen it stays in view beside the fields while you type. Open full-size preview opens it in a new tab, where you can also click through the steps. Nothing typed in a preview is sent anywhere; it answers from a script, with your workspace’s own single sign-on providers and SSO only setting:

name@sso.example shows a single sign-on redirect to your first provider, and, when you have two, name@both.example a choice between them;
any other email or username goes to the password step, or with SSO only on to your providers, as on the real page: straight there with one, a choice with two. Password sign-in is then only at /login?local=1, which the preview doesn’t show;
on the password step, the password wrong shows the wrong-password error, locked the lockout message, and 2fa the two-factor step (the code is 123456); any other password shows “Signed in (preview).”

Without single sign-on the preview shows your workspace’s one-step form, and the full-size preview links to the email-first steps people would see once SSO is on, with two sample providers.

If you can read the single sign-on settings, the page ends with How people sign in: what the sign-in page will do with what people type, in sentences, from your current SSO setup. For example: “People enter their email or username first. Emails at acme.com go straight to Microsoft. Accounts that already sign in with single sign-on go straight to Microsoft. Everyone else is asked for a password.” A domain that both the OIDC and the SAML provider list reads as a choice between the two, which is what people at that domain see. It warns when SSO is set up but can’t be used yet, or when no email domains are set (so new colleagues would be asked for a password they don’t have), and with SSO only on it gives the break-glass address with Copy link. See Email-first sign-in.

Date & time

Absolute timestamps (for example on the version-history timeline) are rendered according to your workspace preferences:

Timezone — any IANA timezone (e.g. America/New_York). Timestamps are stored in UTC and displayed in this zone.
Date format — choose from:
- Medium — Jul 12, 2026
- Long — July 12, 2026
- ISO — 2026-07-12
- US — 07/12/2026
- European — 12/07/2026
Time format — 24-hour (14:05) or 12-hour (2:05 PM).

Theme

CompassDocs supports Light, Dark, and Auto themes, chosen from the switcher in the sidebar footer. Auto follows the visitor’s operating-system preference and updates live when it changes. The choice is remembered per device (stored in the browser), and the correct theme is applied before the page paints, so there’s no flash on load.

Session timeout

Set the idle session timeout — how long a signed-in user can be inactive before being logged out — anywhere from 5 minutes to 30 days. Sessions use a sliding window: each request extends the expiry, so active users stay signed in and only genuinely idle sessions expire.

CompassDocs service status