• Illustration: SharePoint Designer Workflow

The SharePoint Designer Web design application has shipped to volume license customers. The new product supports customization of Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) and SharePoint Server sites, enabling users to define custom Web site templates, approval processes, and Web-based reports for SharePoint sites without writing code. However, the product does require technically savvy users.

SharePoint Designer is one of two new Web design products descended from FrontPage 2003 (which has been discontinued):

• Expression Web Designer targets professional designers creating public Web sites, which might or might not run on Windows Server
• SharePoint Designer targets users and designers customizing sites built with WSS and SharePoint Server sites, which support Web-based team collaboration, Web content management, and document management.

Workflow, Master Pages Lead Improvements

Compared to FrontPage 2003, which also supported customization of WSS and SharePoint Server (formerly SharePoint Portal Server), SharePoint Designer has several particularly noteworthy new features.

Workflow design. SharePoint Designer enables users to define workflows that process documents and data in a SharePoint site. Conceptually, workflows are scripts that respond to events on a SharePoint site and automate document and data management tasks; for example, managing approval of documents prior to public release. The SharePoint Designer workflow design wizard enables users to define workflows as a series of if-then rules, in a user interface similar to that of Outlook's rules feature. (For an illustration, see "SharePoint Designer Workflow".) Site designers could find this feature simpler to use than Visual Studio, the other Microsoft product that supports SharePoint workflow design. However, Visual Studio has better debugging and graphical design tools, and so is more appropriate for complex workflows.

Master Pages. SharePoint Designer supports ASP.NET Master Pages, a feature introduced in the ASP.NET 2.0 Web development platform, which underlies WSS and SharePoint Server. With SharePoint Designer, users can define page templates (Master Pages) with navigation bars, borders, and other recurring features, and have those features appear in every Web page that references a specific Master Page. This in turn enables users to maintain a site's overall structure and look and feel by changing just its Master Pages, rather than changing every page on the site. FrontPage 2003 supported its own template mechanism similar to Master Pages, but SharePoint Designer supports the mechanism built into ASP.NET.

Updated DataViews server control and design tools. DataViews, a FrontPage 2003 feature, enabled users to design Web pages that dynamically refresh themselves from databases, XML files, and other data sources. DataViews in SharePoint Designer support new kinds of data sources, including Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds, which are used for blogs and for publishing other kinds of periodic data updates over the Web. SharePoint Designer also lets designers build DataViews from the Business Data Catalog, a component of SharePoint Server that imports data from business applications (such as enterprise resource planning systems) based on data source descriptions supplied by an administrator. DataViews provide a relatively easy way to generate Web pages with data from the Business Data Catalog.

ASP.NET control support. SharePoint Designer lets designers graphically incorporate and set properties on ASP.NET controls, which are server-side components that dynamically generate elements of Web pages. FrontPage users could code HTML pages that used ASP.NET controls, but didn't have graphical tools for dealing with the controls.

Other improvements in SharePoint Designer over FrontPage 2003 include the following:

• Task panes for applying and managing Cascading Style Sheets, which centralize font, layout, and other visual design information associated with Web pages
• Security administration tools that enable designers to limit access to Master Pages, style sheets, and other elements to specific SharePoint user groups.

Sophisticated Users Required

SharePoint Designer enables designers to create workflows, dynamically generated Web pages, and other sophisticated SharePoint site features without coding. However, these designers will still need many of the skills of software developers. For example, designers will need a good understanding of the complex internal structure of SharePoint sites and how that structure maps to what a site visitor sees. Designers will also need to analyze the interactions among the workflows and workflow steps they create to ensure that they don't conflict with one another or (in the case of SharePoint Server) with built-in workflows.

Consequently, some potential SharePoint Designer customers will opt for Visual Studio, which has much less specific support for SharePoint customization, but which provides more extensive workflow design tools and supports server-side coding and debugging. Future versions of SharePoint Designer would benefit from features that hide SharePoint site complexity more effectively, and better support for coding and debugging workflows.

Availability and Resources

The estimated retail price of SharePoint Designer is US$299; the product is already available to volume license customers and will be generally available by Jan. 2007. SharePoint Designer requires Windows XP SP2, Windows Server 2003 SP1, or Windows Vista on the designer's computer, and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 or SharePoint Server 2007 on the server; it does not support earlier versions of Windows SharePoint Services or SharePoint Portal Server (as SharePoint Server used to be called). The workflow design features require the .NET Framework 3.0 on the client, which is preinstalled on Windows Vista.

FrontPage 2003 and SharePoint customization were explained in "FrontPage 2003 Targets Data-Driven Web Sites" on page 14 of the Oct. 2003 Update.

The replacement of FrontPage by SharePoint Designer and Expression Web Designer is summarized in "FrontPage Becomes SharePoint Authoring Tool" on page 20 of the Apr. 2006 Update.

Microsoft's SharePoint Designer Web site is office.microsoft.com/sharepointdesigner.