SharePoint Designer (SPD) has been free from Microsoft since April. In those two months, some lines have been drawn in the sand. Some users are of the opinion that it should be completely locked down and not allowed in the organization. Others have the view that it makes everything better. Still others aren’t even sure what value it could possibly bring. It is free, so you get what you pay for, right? Not always!

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: