A note from Mark Miller: Woody Windischman and Asif Rehmani are contributing authors at EndUserSharePoint.com. This is the introductory chapter to their book, Professional Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007.

Hi Everyone! One of the things everyone likes to do while they’re browsing for books in the store is read the covers and the introductions. While the listings for my book on the various sites include the back-cover description, and Wrox has posted the Table of Contents and Chapter 1 as PDF, the introduction hasn’t been posted anywhere. I thought you might like to read it, so here it is – an Introduction excerpt from Professional Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007…

INTRODUCTION

"Can you make it look less like SharePoint?"
Such a simple question, and yet, like someone opening the lid to Pandora’s Box, the customer asking it can release a whole range of troubles into the life of a web designer. The latest release of Microsoft SharePoint products has taken the world by storm. Faster than anyone could have foreseen, businesses large and small have discovered that SharePoint addresses a range of needs, and have rushed to jump on the bandwagon.

SharePoint is not merely a web server. It is a large and complex application, with many moving parts. Some of them are easy to customize; others require a bit more finesse. Tools and guidance for that customization are few and far between. Fortunately for you, SharePoint Designer is such a tool, and this book provides the guidance. Together, they enable you to look your customer in the eye and answer with a resounding: "Yes!"

Yet SharePoint Designer can do far more than customize SharePoint sites. It is a fully-featured web design tool in its own right, with excellent support for many industry standards, as well as backward compatibility with a few nonstandard capabilities.

Who This Book Is For

This book is for anyone who has been asked the opening question. You may be an experienced web designer or a web application developer who has never used SharePoint. You may be a system administrator who needs to tweak a few things to match an existing standard. Perhaps you are a business analyst looking for ways to integrate some CRM information into the company’s home page. All of you will find something useful here.

If your familiarity with SharePoint is limited, chapters 2, 3, and 4 will be indispensable for you. They cover the key features of SharePoint, and how they are viewed from the user’s, administrator’s, and web designer’s perspectives, respectively.

This book is also for people upgrading from Microsoft FrontPage. SharePoint Designer is one of two direct successors to FrontPage. As a result, FrontPage users will find much that is familiar, as well as many things that have changed. In general, you will find that while you can edit existing sites that use legacy features, SharePoint Designer’s function layout encourages a much more standards-compliant way to design new sites and content.

This book assumes you have a more than passing familiarity with designing applications for the web. A basic knowledge of JavaScript is assumed, as is an understanding of HTML tags. Some allowance is made for the rise of certain technologies in recent years. A few chapters deal with CSS, XML, and XSL, and a short introduction to each is provided where appropriate.

The book also assumes a certain willingness to explore. Although all of the core functions, menus, and toolbars of SharePoint Designer are described, this is not a Bible that explains each and every menu item and dialog tick in excruciating detail. If a program feature offers several options, a representative few are described, and one may be used in an example.

The book assumes you are familiar with basic Windows operations and applications. Where functions are common in many applications, they probably are not discussed at all. (You are shown where to find the Formatting toolbar, for instance, but your familiarity with the icons and meanings of Bold, Center, and the various bulleting options is assumed.) It’s also assumed that you know how to point, click, cut, copy, and paste.

The later chapters move out of SharePoint Designer and into Visual Studio. They cover creating extensions to SharePoint, SharePoint Designer, or both. Examples are provided in both C# and Visual Basic .NET. Although the source is discussed and/or documented in the text, no attempt is made to teach the languages themselves, so proficiency in one of these languages is desirable. Many readers may consider these chapters optional, although system administrators should at least pay attention to chapter 18.

What This Book Covers

This book covers Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007, with an emphasis on using it to customize web sites based on Microsoft SharePoint products and technologies. You will learn about Master Pages, Themes, and various Web Parts that enable you to create powerful applications with little or no code.

A short overview of SharePoint is provided to ensure that you are not flying blind when you customize SharePoint sites. At the other end of the scale, you are taken outside the box with chapters that teach you how to use Visual Studio and other tools to extend the capabilities available in both SharePoint and SharePoint Designer.

Aspects of SharePoint Designer beyond SharePoint customization are not ignored, however. You will find sections that cover the basic web-editing features, generic application of the CSS editor, and site administration functions provided by SharePoint Designer. Many elements, such as data views, while described in the SharePoint context, are also relevant without a SharePoint environment.

How This Book Is Structured

This book is made up of 18 chapters, in five parts. Each part brings together related tasks and content. Part I is fundamental to everything else, but the other parts do not necessarily need to be read in a particular order. They are, however, largely progressive in their complexity.

Part I, “The Basics,” provides an overview of SharePoint Designer, SharePoint technology, and their relationship to one another.
Part II, “Customizing the SharePoint Look and Feel,” shows how to use SharePoint Designer to customize various aspects of your sites.
Part III, “Applications without Programming,” shows how SharePoint Designer can create many powerful applications that in the past would have required considerable programming effort.
Part IV, “Programming on the Client Side,” demonstrates some tools provided by SharePoint and SharePoint Designer to enable even more custom interactivity.
Part V, “Beyond SharePoint Designer,” takes you far past the built-in capabilities of SharePoint Designer with extensions, add-ins, migration, and conversion tools.

Web design is an intrinsically visual process, web designers tend to be visual learners, and SharePoint Designer is a visual tool. This book takes that into account by including a relatively high proportion of screenshots. There are also step-by-step exercises where appropriate. Finally, it wouldn’t be a Wrox Professional book without sample code, and that is here in abundance. In this case, "code" is interpreted liberally to include markup, CSS, and scripting, in addition to compiled source.

What You Need to Use This Book

While you can learn much from this book simply by reading, to follow along with the exercises and step-by-step instructions, it will be helpful to have a few things. Most important, of course, is a copy of SharePoint Designer 2007. You should also have access to a SharePoint environment that you can use without adversely impacting production sites.

Certain examples make use of Web Parts that are only included with editions of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 or Microsoft Search Server 2008. The Express Edition of Search Server (MSSX) is available as a free download from Microsoft, and is a sufficient version of SharePoint to perform all of the exercises and examples in this book, except for those in chapter 8.

Chapter 8 describes Publishing layouts and content management. These are features exclusive to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. You will need access to this if you wish to follow the examples in that chapter.

To compile the example programs in Part V, you need Visual Studio 2005 or Visual Studio 2008, Standard Edition or higher. You also need to download the following add-ons from the Microsoft MSDN site:

• The Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Software Development Kit (WSS SDK)
• The Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Software Development Kit (MOSS SDK)
• Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO)
• Visual Studio Extensions for Windows SharePoint Services (VSeWSS)

The SharePoint Designer add-in example in chapter 17 requires the SharePoint Designer 2007 Add-In project template from the Microsoft CodePlex site.

Most SharePoint designers and developers find it convenient to create a sandbox development environment containing all of the tools listed here (and other favorite development utilities) on a virtual machine (VM). All versions of SharePoint require Windows Server 2003 or Windows Server 2008, with at least 1GB of RAM to install successfully (2GB or more of RAM is recommended).

Related Products

SharePoint Designer is not the only Microsoft product created for manipulating web pages. It is closely related to Microsoft Expression Web, which sprang from the same FrontPage roots. In addition, Visual Studio is a useful tool for web designers of all stripes.

SharePoint Designer Compared to Expression Web

As with the mythical Hydra, who grows more than one head if the first is cut off, the end of FrontPage was the beginning several children. Like SharePoint Designer, Microsoft Expression Web is a direct descendent of Microsoft FrontPage. In fact, from a basic page-editing standpoint, SharePoint Designer and Expression Web appear virtually identical.

Scratch the surface, however, and the differences become clear. Nothing says it better than the dialog shown in Figure 1, which you get when you try to open a SharePoint-based site in Expression Web. Expression Web has no capability to work on a SharePoint site.

Figure I-1

SharePoint Designer, on the other hand, happily opens web sites created with most versions of SharePoint. In addition, SharePoint Designer offers more complete support for sites created using the FrontPage Server Extensions.

So, why use Expression Web? If you don’t need to work with SharePoint, Expression Web provides an excellent set of tools for creating standards-based web sites. It integrates with Visual Studio, supports PHP (which SharePoint Designer does not), and includes several web site templates that are not available with SharePoint Designer.

SharePoint Designer Compared to Visual Studio

The other tool you might consider for working with SharePoint is Visual Studio. In fact, there are certain things that cannot be done with SharePoint Designer. Some of these tasks are described in Part V, “Beyond SharePoint Designer.” The key is to remember that SharePoint Designer is generally used to customize SharePoint sites and manipulate existing features, whereas Visual Studio is used to develop new SharePoint functionality.

Professional Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007
Woodrow W. Windischman, Bryan Phillips, Asif Rehmani
ISBN: 978-0-470-28761-3