SCSM 2012: Self Service Portal Service category color customization

Lately I’ve been wandering a bit more on the Technet Forums, this has been pretty useful. Friday I came across this thread from Bart Timmermans about customization in the Self Service Portal of the product System Center Service Manager 2012. He asked if it was possible to adjust the styling of Service category headers. Of course I accepted the challenge.

Analysis
The Self Service Portal is a solution on SharePoint 2010 which deploys some web parts. Like Travis Wright described in his latest Self Service Portal blogpost those web parts use Silverlight .xap files. After some .NET Reflector work on the Portal.BasicResources DLL. I found that a lot of the color styling for the portal is being done by using brushes.

Brushes
A brush is an Silverlight object which can be used to paint for example solid colors or linear gradient. In that DLL I found a .xaml file which defined some solidcolorbrushes and they had a key. In Silverlight they use a 8 digit notation for the color, this is a RGBA value.

Settings.xml
The Self Service Portal actually has a settings.xml file which can be used to define some basic settings. I noticed it also had some setting keys for colors. This triggered me to add a key for one of the brushes, ExpanderHeaderBgBrush. My attempt worked. After adjusting the Settings.xml and clearing my browsers cache I saw a new green color!

Solution
1. Go to C:\inetpub\wwwroot\System Center Service Manager Portal\ContentHost\Clientbin (or another location if your installation directory was different
2. Open the Settings.xml file
3. Add a setting key for ExpanderHeaderBgBrush with your desired RGBA color:

Happy customizing!