Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2010 Step by Step

Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2010 has seen major improvements over its previous version, Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007. It is now the preferred tool for site owners and what Gartner termed as ‘citizen developers’. Using the browser and other what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) tools such as, SharePoint Designer 2010, InfoPath 2010 and Visio Premium 2010, citizen developers, that is, those users operating outside the scope of IT can create new business applications for consumptions by others. These non-code solutions are successful because citizen developers know what they want to achieve, they understand their business needs and with a bit of SharePoint knowledge they can wire together the business processes or sets of tasks for their organization. Using the book, SharePoint Designer 2010 Step by Step – site owners and citizen developers can build up their SharePoint 2010 knowledge so that they can build citizen developed solutions, and then reuse those solutions as a basis for future SharePoint sites.

The book is a step by step tutorial; explaining what you are doing and why, and gives you a good understanding of why. It contains images of commands in the margin so you can easily find them on the ribbon and contains many screenshots so you can confirm that you are following the steps correctly. You can also use the book as a reference as it has an extensive index and glossary.

Don’t be put off by its name; this book is not aimed at just web designers – with SharePoint Designer, you can carry out similar tasks to the browser; however, you can now complete more tasks natively, without the need to jump back and forth between SharePoint Designer and the browser. For example, when you first open a site with SharePoint Designer you are presented within the SharePoint Designer workspace with a site’s summary page. This page provides you with the basic information about the site and allows you to change many site settings, manage permissions and create new subsites. You will also notice from the screenshot below, that SharePoint Designer has a redesigned user interface (UI) that uses Microsoft Office Fluent UI.

Tip: Once you open a SharePoint 2010 site in SharePoint Designer, you can open individual files, that are not stored within the site.

Another reason why you it is easier to complete similar tasks with SharePoint Designer than using the web browser to is the Navigation pane. This replaces the Folder List task pane in SharePoint Designer 2007 and focuses on SharePoint objects and not where the objects are stored. You can then pin each of these object types to show their contents in a mini-gallery, whilst you complete another task in the workspace.

Although SharePoint Designer is a wonderful tool, it is not a tool that everyone should use, for example, if you only have contributor rights on a site you will not be able to use SharePoint Designer. In addition to SharePoint Designer’s in-built usage restrictions, IT and site collection owners can limit its usage at either the Web application or site collection level. Therefore you may see different SharePoint objects in the Navigation pane as compared to another user or depending on the site collection where the site is located.

Tip: Using the Log In As icon in the SharePoint Designer status bar, you can log in as another user without closing and restarting the program.

When you create the top level site in a site collection based on the team site template, then by default – users who are members of the Site Owners and Designers site groups can use SharePoint Designer. However they cannot customize site definition pages, nor can they see the hidden URL structure of a SharePoint site – the hierarchical tree view displayed when you click All File in the Navigation pane, that shows where files are physical or virtually located in a site. When you create a site collection using the Publishing Portal site template, then site owners and designers have no such limitations. This does make sense. On publishing site collections, you will probably want to delegate the control of content to individuals on a site by site basis. These individuals may need to create their own page layouts and change the branding of their sites. On team sites, you may wish to keep the same look and feel throughout the site collection and prevent all but site collection owners from customizing site definition pages.

Tip: Whenever you create a new site collection, check that the SharePoint Designer settings meet your business needs.

Microsoft has also addressed the issue that when you saved a site definition page with SharePoint Designer 2007, it would always store a copy of the page in the content database – known as customizing or un-ghosting the page, even when this was not necessary. Now with SharePoint Designer 2010, Microsoft has implemented a “safe by default” approach. When you edit a page you will only be able to amend the code within Web Part zones or within the Wiki page content area. If IT or the site collection owner has allowed you, you can edit the page outside those areas by placing the page in advance edit mode. This will result in customizing or un-ghosting the page – so customizing a page has not gone away, but you don’t always have to do it when editing a page with SharePoint Designer.

SharePoint Designer 2010 Step by Step provides you with tips and guidance on how to use SharePoint Designer 2010. It helps you understand the consequences of performing tasks and gives you the skills and understanding for how to best build and modify your solutions to meet your business requirements.