How to Create a Site Using Sharepoint Designer 2013
SharePoint Designer Tutorials, Tips and Tricks
SharePoint Designer is a tool from Microsoft used to rapidly create SharePoint solutions without code. It is intended for power users or even developers to quickly respond to changing business needs.
| Andreas Glaser
Videos & Books
I'll add new videos continually.
SharePoint at Work: Creating a Workflow in SharePoint Designer
This course covers the fundamentals on how to create a SharePoint workflow in SharePoint Designer. This course applies to SharePoint 2010, 2013, 2016 as well as SharePoint Online in Office 365.
Watch the Course for Free*
* You can watch 200 minutes for free using the trial.
Back to top
What is SharePoint Designer?
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.
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 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 can be grouped into 4 main 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...
...with 2010 you can't do this anymore since it allows you only to open SharePoint 2010 sites.
Back to top
SharePoint Designer 2016
There's no SharePoint Designer 2016 and there won't be a release of another product. You can still use SharePoint Designer 2013 to connect to SharePoint 2016.
In my opinion Microsoft is moving away from the idea that a Power User is capable of customizing SharePoint. There must be thousands of different customized environments out there and Microsoft has to care about them when releasing a new version of SharePoint. SharePoint Designer made it easy to modify SharePoint but also impacted migration.
Back to top
SharePoint Designer 2010
What's new?
SharePoint Designer 2010 offers a lot of new and enhanced features compared to the 2007 version.
The first thing you will notice after installing and starting SharePoint Designer is the new user interface.
User interface
Now we have the ribbon too... well using the tool is a little bit confusing and not intuitive. At least for me i had some trouble using it the right way and knowing my current position in the SharePoint site structure. I hope this gets better with more experience and usage.
Workflow designer
SharePoint Designer workflows are now reusable... that itself is a great enhancement. Further more you can modify the out-of-the-box workflows like approval, collect feedback or collect signatures. Also new are sub-steps and impersonation steps.
Business Connectivity Services
Integrating external data wasn't easy in 2007 saying it with some nice words and it didn't fulfill the expectations. Now we have external content types and we can read and write.
Visual Studio 2010
SharePoint Designer and Visual Studio 2010 go hand in hand and complement each other. Workflows created with SharePoint Designer can be reused in Visual Studio and activities created in Visual Studio can be used with the designer.
So an advanced user knowing business requirements can model a workflow for the developer.
Visio
Visio 2010 can be used too by an user knowing business requirements to develop a process model. This can be imported using the designer to create a workflow for SharePoint 2010.
Custom actions
In SharePoint 2007 it was possible to enhance the out-of-the-box menus with custom actions. Now you can use SharePoint Designer 2010 to extend the ribbon.
Restriction
Yes, restriction is the thing that was missing in SharePoint 2007. Now an administrator can decide how an user can modify the look and feel of a SharePoint site at the server-, web application- or site collection level.
Summary
SharePoint Designer 2010 has gotten a lot of improvements and additions... right now it feels a little bit un-intuitive but we will see. Looks like it has a lot of potential and if yes I hope it can eliminate the bad reputation of 2007 version.
Top Tips
Here are the top tips (or answers) to the most common questions regarding SharePoint Designer 2010 you should consider before you start to install the application.
There are also some tips about SharePoint Designer 2007.
What can I do with it?
SharePoint Designer allows you as an advanced user or even as a developer to rapidly create solutions without code. It covers the following topics:
- Management… of sites and lists.
- 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.
Can I edit other sites than SharePoint 2010 sites?
- No. You can't edit SharePoint 2007 sites or other sites using ftp which was possible with SharePoint Designer 2007.
Should I use the x64 or x32 version?
- If you need to use SharePoint Designer 2007 in order to edit SharePoint 2007 sites you need to install the x32 version of SharePoint Designer 2010.
Source: Matt Groves Blog
Can I control where and how people use SharePoint Designer within my sites?
Yes, but it depends on the version you are using:
- SharePoint Designer 2010 lockdown
Settings
The SharePoint Designer can be enabled independently of the SharePoint version you are using and the features you have activated in a template. Furthermore it's a lot easier and more user friendly to setup the behavior of SharePoint Designer.
Topics covered in this article:
- SharePoint 2010
SharePoint 2010
SharePoint 2010 allows you to disable the capabilities of SharePoint Designer 2010 at two different levels:
- Web application and
- Site collection.
You can enable or disable:
- SharePoint Designer
- Enable Detaching Pages from the Site Definition
- Enable Customizing Master Pages and Page Layouts
- Enable Managing of the Web Site URL Structure
Disable SharePoint Designer 2010 at Web Application
Go to Application Management > Manage web applications and select the web application you want to modify. Click General Settings > SharePoint Designer:
You have 4 different options in order to integrate SharePoint Designer within your SharePoint site.
Enable or disable custom SharePoint Designer settings:
Disable SharePoint Designer 2010 at Site Collection
Go to Site Actions > Site Settings and under the Site Collection Administration category you will find the SharePoint Designer settings:
Enable or disable custom SharePoint Designer settings:
Back to top
SharePoint Designer 2007
SharePoint Designer faced a lot of bad critics and here's why.
What went wrong?
Before we talk about the things that went wrong with SharePoint Designer 2007 let's talk about the position of this tool in the market.
Microsoft did a research and discovered that there are 3 groups needed to be addressed by this tool:
- "Information Workers: This group is interested in developing data-intensive and process-focused scenarios in an enterprise intranet."
- "Designers: These users are all about designing great websites using the latest technologies."
- "Developers: This group is all about designing software and applications using sophisticated coding tools."
[Source: SharePoint Designer 2007 Positioning]
And in my opinion the addressed target groups are maybe a good idea but it's not working in the real world... let me tell you why:
Information workers
I have never met one person belonging to this group and calling himself an information worker. Since the last 4 years where I deployed SharePoint 2007 in a lot of different companies from different economic sectors I have never met a person capable or interested in doing this stuff. Sorry...
Designers
Designers or publishers have their own tools using them each day. And a lot of them would never use a tool by Microsoft even if it's the best tool in the whole wide world. There are habits or prejudices... they would never use SharePoint Designer 2007. Sorry again.
Developers
Now it comes down to us... we developers have to do everything. Regardless of that a lot of us tried to use it and here it happened that it didn't work as expected all the time:
- It changed or destroyed the layout...
- Changes are stored in the database and can create update or migration problems...
- Workflows aren't reusable...
- ...
This is usually the point where a developer starts Visual Studio. Also a lot of developers didn't like the fact that there was a lot of Xml configuration.
Customers
Yes this group has to take responsibility too. It differs from country to country but usually my customers want more... and more... and more and at one point SharePoint Designer is not capable of doing all the things and the investments made are lost because a solution has to be created from scratch using Visual Studio.
Summary
So maybe I'm living in the wrong country or there's something true about that. SharePoint Designer 2007 had a bad start and talking about SharePoint Designer in front of other people... yes you guess it: a murmur goes through the crowd.
I hope this changes and the 2010 version get's a fair opportunity.
I think SharePoint Designer is a good tool and you can do a lot of stuff out-of-the-box without coding. It's easy, it's fast and if you know what you are doing I suggest using it.
Back to top
How to Create a Site Using Sharepoint Designer 2013
Source: https://andreasglaser.com/blog/sharepoint-designer
0 Response to "How to Create a Site Using Sharepoint Designer 2013"
Post a Comment