SharePoint Designer allows you as an advanced user or even as a developer to rapidly create solutions without code. Business needs are changing or new ones come up... instead of doing a huge specification and implementation phase which consumes a lot of resources we have the possibility to rapidly create solutions for the business needs.
And it doesn’t matter what these needs are: collaborative sites, web publishing, business intelligence, workflows or the integration of Line-Of-Business data, SharePoint Designer is the answer. And it’s completely free. You can read more by downloading the product information below.
How does it work? After installing SharePoint Designer you need to activate it. After that you connect to an existing SharePoint 2010 or SharePoint 2007 site and that’s it. You can start to modify your site right now.
Important note: Using SharePoint Designer can result in behavior you don’t want to. Example: By modifying a site you can detach the site from it’s layout stored at a central location. Updating the layout with a solution doesn’t include your modified site. So SharePoint Designer should only be used by advanced and trained persons.
The things you can do with SharePoint Designer (2010) can be grouped into 4 categories:
- Data sources: Create and manage internal and external data sources.
- Views and forms: Create views and forms to work with data.
- Workflows: Create workflows to manage business processes.
- Branding: Customize the look and feel of your SharePoint site.
By the way: Back in 2007 you were able to edit every web site using SharePoint Designer...
...now in 2010 you can’t do this anymore since it allows you only to open SharePoint 2010 sites.
SharePoint Designer download
The application is for free and can be downloaded at the following sites:
Download SharePoint Designer 2010
Download SharePoint Designer 2007
SharePoint Designer resources
Summary
If you are interested in the new features of SharePoint Designer 2010 please read:
SharePoint Designer 2010 - What's new?
Need more SharePoint Designer resources? Please take a look at SharePoint Designer.
If you have more donwload links please drop a comment.