It is now official. Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 is available Free of Charge as a download from Microsoft’s SharePoint Designer site (http://www.microsoft.com/spd). I had known about this for quite a while, but was not at liberty to announce it publicly until now.

I’m pretty excited about this news, but I understand that this news can be confusing as well. There are some valid questions that come to mind such as:

• Why is this change happening?
• How do I get SharePoint Designer and learn more about how to use it? What can I do with SharePoint Designer?
• What if I had already purchased SharePoint Designer? Can I get a refund?
• What is the future of SharePoint Designer?

I attempt to answer all these questions and more below.

What prompted this change

If you have used SharePoint Designer already, you already know that it is truly essential to making many customizations in SharePoint. These customizations could be things like making your sites conform to the look and feel of your company branding or fetching data from a variety of data sources and displaying it on a SharePoint page or creating powerful workflows on your sites (a more thorough list of the things you can accomplish with SharePoint Designer appears in another section below). Until now, you could only get SharePoint Designer in one of a few ways:

• Through an Enterprise Agreement with Microsoft
• Buy a standalone copy (for example Amazon had it for sale online for $238.49)
• An automatic upgrade from FrontPage 2003 if you had a Software Assurance agreement with Microsoft

You could not get it as part of any of the 8 Microsoft Office suites. None of them came with SharePoint Designer! So the powers that be at Microsoft decided that all customers should get this software free of charge since once you have exhausted your options for customizing SharePoint using the browser, SharePoint Designer is a very logical next step. For what it’s worth, I completely agree!

Does that mean that SharePoint Designer is being phased out?

Absolutely Not! I have seen the next version of SharePoint Designer and let me tell you that it’s going to be even more valuable and essential to use SharePoint Designer with SharePoint vNext. I can’t go into the specifics because of my NDA with Microsoft so you’ll just have to trust me on this J. The ability to create robust customizations is a critical capability and Microsoft will continue to make investments in this area.

The next version of SharePoint Designer will also be free of charge.

What can SharePoint Designer do for me?

I have been a big fan of SharePoint Designer for a long time now (Well, I did write a book on it: Professional SharePoint Designer 2007) so I’m very biased and passionate about it. It’s hard to not like it. There are Loads of things that you can do with SharePoint Designer that are just not possible with any other product on the market. To take real advantage of your investment in SharePoint, I feel you really need SharePoint Designer. It’s not an option!

To break it down, here are a few things you can accomplish with SharePoint Designer:

1. Create SharePoint Sites
2. Create Lists and Libraries
3. Create html or aspx pages for content
4. Create Web Part Zones
5. Create Master Pages
6. Create Page Layouts
7. Create and Apply Style Sheets
8. Backup and Restore Sites
9. Report on Site Usage
10. Create Powerful Multi-Step Workflows
11. Create Views of Data from a variety of Data Sources (using the Almighty Data View web part)
    And more…

SharePoint Designer can be used on Intranets, Extranets, Internet facing sites and also SharePoint Online services. The use of SharePoint Designer is not for everyone though. As awesome a product it is, in the inexperience hands, it can end up doing damage to your environment. More on this later…

Do I get a refund if I already have SharePoint Designer?

No! Microsoft will not be refunding any monies for prior purchases of SharePoint Designer. However, if you have a license to SharePoint Designer, you now have rights to Microsoft Expression Web 2 as well (also to Microsoft FrontPage 2003 if you still need it to manage your SharePoint 2003 environment).

Expresssion Web was born as an answer to customizing non-SharePoint sites. When FrontPage 2003 brand was retired, SharePoint Designer and Expression Web were created to be able to customize and manage SharePoint and non-SharePoint sites, respectively. So with the current version of Expression Web, you cannot manage SharePoint sites. However, in the future version of Expression Web, designers will be able to create modern, dynamic and interactive sites that incorporate Silverlight and rich media.

How to get SharePoint Designer and learn how to use it

SharePoint Designer is now easily available to be downloaded from this site: http://www.microsoft.com/spd

Learning how to use it is Strongly Recommended before you start customizing your SharePoint sites. Here are a couple of ways you can start to learn how to use it:

SharePoint Designer book

SharePoint Designer Video Tutorials

How do I prevent certain people from using SharePoint Designer in the environment?

As I mentioned earlier, as great a product SharePoint Designer is, in the inexperienced hands, it can cause harm to your SharePoint environment. There are various ways to lock down your environment or limit privileges to what a user can do with SharePoint Designer. There is an exhaustive list of options and how to configure them on SharePoint Designer Team’s blog at the following link:
http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepointdesigner/archive/2008/11/25/locking-down-sharepoint-designer.aspx

Action Items

So to conclude, my recommendation is: make SharePoint Designer an essential part of your SharePoint strategy. My plan is to keep supporting you and providing you with information on SharePoint Designer’s capability through my Blog, Newsletter and Screencasts I produce.

 

Author: Asif Rehmani – SharePoint Server MVP, MCT
Website: SharePoint eLearning

Asif has over 10 years of training and consulting experience in the IT industry. He has been training and consulting on primarily SharePoint technologies for over 4 years. He is a SharePoint Server MVP and MCT.

Asif is the co-author of the book “Professional SharePoint Designer 2007“ by Wrox publications. He has also been a speaker on SharePoint topics at several conferences over the years including Microsoft’s SharePoint Conference, SharePoint Connections, Advisor Live, and Information Workers Conference.

Asif runs a SharePoint eLearning website (http://www.sharepoint-elearning.com) which provides dozens of SharePoint Video Tutorials. He was the co-founder and is currently one of the active leaders of the Chicago SharePoint User Group.