Professional SharePoint 2013 Administration

Chapter 18

Working with SharePoint Designer

WHAT’S IN THIS CHAPTER

• Introduction to SharePoint Designer
• New features of SharePoint Designer 2013
• Compatibility with SharePoint 2010
• The SharePoint Server 2013 Workflow platform
• Enabling SharePoint Designer restrictions
• SharePoint’s new look and feel
• Site management with SharePoint Designer
• Branding with SharePoint Designer
• Creating and Managing Workflows in SharePoint Designer

In order to learn and work with SharePoint Designer (SPD), you first have to be willing to accept change. SharePoint Designer is synonymous with the word change and for a good reason: Each new version has undergone major changes, and SharePoint Designer 2013 continues this pattern.

In order to understand the direction in which SPD is headed, however, it’s helpful to know something about its past. Back in the early days of SharePoint 2003, users didn’t have an officially branded version of Designer that they could use to customize SharePoint. Instead, SharePoint users had to take advantage of the tools currently available, using Microsoft FrontPage to edit SharePoint 2003 sites.

At the time this seemed like a good idea and there was much rejoicing throughout the land. It wasn’t until organizations started trying to upgrade to SharePoint 2007 that they saw the error of their ways. FrontPage had so drastically changed the code of SharePoint 2003 sites that in many cases upgrading the site to SharePoint 2007 was impossible.

With SharePoint 2007, Microsoft attempted ...