Professional SharePoint® 2010 Branding and User Interface Design

Restricting Access to SharePoint Designer

❘

95

Users with appropriate access permissions could do whatever they liked with SharePoint Designer

2007. There was no real granular control. A user with SPD installed and site owner permissions

had virtually unlimited control of a site. Organizations were forced to either block the use of SPD

by preventing it from being installed (which wasn’t always possible), to prevent any user other than

someone in IT from having full control of a site, or to defi ne the acceptable usage of SPD within a

governance document. To be fair, there were other ways to prevent site access with SPD, but these

required changes typically made by developers and therefore were beyond the capabilities of most

server administrators. In short, although it was possible to govern the use of SPD 2007, it was more

effort than most companies were willing to expend.

One of the most signifi cant improvements to SPD 2010 is that you can easily control its use.

Administrators can now control not only who uses SPD 2010, but also how it is used. This

increased granular control enables, for example, the use of SPD but not the customization of

fi les. Greater control doesn’t mean that all the risks associated with using SPD are eliminated; it

simply means it is now much easier to control the risks.

SPD 2007 offered the Contributor Settings feature, which wasn’t heavily used and, si ...