Question

I am looking at the default master page in SharePoint 2013 (v15.master) and there is a server control there <SharePoint:SuiteBarBrandingElement runat="server"/> which on the page renders as ‘SharePoint’. I can’t figure out where to change it to something else (without writing code behind).

Answer 1

Information is thin, but there does not appear to be any UI-based way to get at this setting. But a setting it is (actually, a property on SPWebApplication).

Refer to this (unhelpful) documentation: SPWebApplication.SuiteBarBrandingElementHtml

Like you point out, you could write a solution to modify this property, but we can also use some PowerShell to get at it.

Executing this in the SharePoint 2013 Management Shell:

$app = Get-SPWebApplication http://my.sp2013.site/
$app.SuiteBarBrandingElementHtml

Yields this output:

<div class="ms-core-brandingText">SharePoint</div>

This means that we can just assign a new value here:

$app.SuiteBarBrandingElementHtml = '<div class="ms-core-brandingText">Hello World!</div>'
$app.Update()

That aside, it would be pretty handy to build a solution that exposed the property via the Admin UI to update it. I don’t know why Microsoft didn’t provide this out of the box; it seems like that was the intention (at some point).