Getting Started with SharePoint Designer 2010 – Part 1

As a consultant, I get this question very often: "I'd like to do this and that with SharePoint. Could you tell me how can we do that without writing any code?" Generally, my answer is one of this three:

• "Of course, it's very simple, you have the following OOTB opportunities…"
• "Yes, you can do it, but you need to use SharePoint Designer because of this and that…"
• "Forget it, you need to write code."

To be honest, much of my colleagues don't like SharePoint Designer 2007 but I do and I also like the second answer. Especially since I met the SharePoint Designer 2010...

This is the first part of a huge series about SharePoint Designer 2010. If I would write for a week long it even wouldn't be enough to write about SPD 2010. So jump into that, and see what's new in this product!

My first impression was a big "wow", then a bigger one "wow", then a much bigger question mark: "but how can I use it?" - You know, SharePoint Designer also got a new user interface with ribbon, and it's so new (and so cool)… Do you remember your first experience for example about Word 2007 and the new UI? Imagine the same with SharePoint Designer 2010. Here you are, the brand new opening screen right after opening a site (in my example the site name is 'Customer Management’):

This opening screen has a lot of functions and options we didn't have in SharePoint Designer 2007, so we can be excited about it immediately. Some examples:

• Inline property editor (Title and Description)
• General info about the site (URL, SharePoint version, storage used, quota info, number of users)
• Links to some customization
• Enable or Disable Quick Launch, Tree View and RSS with just a click
• My favorite part of this UI: Permissions. Finally, we can manage ste permissions from here!

Excellent, right?

But most probably you'd like to know how to find other options and menus, as the ribbon is very simple and doesn't get too much. It's very simple: if you don't see the navigation pane on the left side, just click on the site's name at the top of the window and the site menu is appearing immediately. That's it!

The mst interesting operations in this menu, in my opinion:

• Workflows - You can manage the site's workflow right from here. Workflow designer is improved, for example you can create site workflows as well as reusable workflows!
• Content Types - You can also manage your content types from here, including content type properties, document templates, content type IDs, etc.
• Data Sources
• Entities
• …

More to come, stay tuned!