Microsoft SharePoint 2007 Technologies

11.2 Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 243

Chapter 11

detail and delve into the topic of InfoPath Forms Services to show an exam-

ple of using an InfoPath form in a workflow.

As you can see, Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and SharePoint Server

2007 provides a highly extensible platform upon which you can build sophis-

ticated applications to meet your business needs. Thankfully, there are a

number of tools that can make the development journey much easier. Let’s

have a quick look at two of the Microsoft offerings that you will no doubt

leverage when customizing and extending SharePoint, namely SharePoint

Designer 2007 and Visual Studio 2005.

11.2 Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007

Microsoft Office FrontPage 2003 (FrontPage) remains a very popular tool for

editing WSS 2.0 and SharePoint Portal Server 2003. Back in 2003,

FrontPage was Microsoft’s main product for Web site creation and manage-

ment and includes all of the necessary design, authoring, data, and publish-

ing tools to create dynamic Web sites. The FrontPage team did a tremendous

job of providing an easy-to-use medium for designing and extending your

SharePoint site, and FrontPage became Microsoft’s recommended product

for advanced customizations of both WSS 2.0 and SharePoint Portal Server

2003 sites. One of the more popular integration features of FrontPage is its

ability to allow you to create a special type of Web Part, known as a data view

Web Part. This Web Part in conjunction with the data source catalog allows

you to present live views of data in your SharePoint site. The data can come

from a variety of sources, such as a SharePoint list, a SharePoint library, an

XML Web service or even an Oracle database. The data retrieved by the data

view Web Part is formatted using XSLT for final presentation in the browser.

This allowed Web designers, developers, and power users to easily create cus-

tomized views of data to display in their SharePoint sites. The ease of use of

FrontPage is a key factor in its success as a customization tool for SharePoint.

Building on this success, Microsoft has evolved FrontPage into two separate

products, one that specifically targets SharePoint users, known as Microsoft

Office SharePoint Designer 2007 (SharePoint Designer), and one that targets

professional Web designers that are not designing SharePoint sites, known as

Expression Web. SharePoint Designer is now Microsoft’s recommended tool

for creating solutions, designing Web pages, and authoring content for

SharePoint sites.

SharePoint Designer contains a host of designer tools and SharePoint

integration components that not only ease the customization of SharePoint

content but also aid the actual administration and management of the con-

tent. From a manageability perspective, SharePoint Designer introduces the

concept of contributor mode by providing SharePoint administrators with

an additional layer for administering who can do what to the content of

244 11.2 Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007

their SharePoint sites. Contributor mode is enabled by default and is con-

trolled by a combination of SharePoint permission levels and SharePoint

Designer Contributor settings. For example, default permission levels such

as Approve, Full Control, Manage Hierarchy, Design, Contribute, Read,

View Only, Restricted Read, and Limited Access can each be linked to a spe-

cific contributor group, which further defines what they can do within the

confines of SharePoint Designer, such as limiting page edits to a specific set

of folders or disabling some of the SharePoint Designer menu options. Fig-

ure 11.2 shows the SharePoint Designer Contributor Settings dialog and its

associated Contributor Group Properties dialog. You can access the contrib-

utor settings by selecting the Contributor option from the bottom of the

Task Panes menu in SharePoint Designer. The figure shows the default con-

tent authors contributor group linked to the SharePoint contribute permis-

sion level.

The list that appears on the left of the Contributor Group Properties

dialog shows the different options to which you can refine access. Figure 11.3

shows the default settings for Content Authors when creating pages in Share-

Point Designer. In this particular example, the content authors are allowed to

create blank pages and Web Part pages, and are restricted to only being able

to delete and rename the pages and folders that they create. Additionally,

they can only create pages from the listed master page, which in this case is

the default.master.

Figure 11.2

Contributor

Settings in

SharePoint

Designer 2007.