What Is Office SharePoint Designer 2007?

The 2007 Microsoft Office system offers two new products that are mostly based on Microsoft Office FrontPage technology: SharePoint Designer 2007 and Expression Web Designer. Both products address different usage scenarios.

Expression Web Designer is the next-generation tool for designing dynamic, standards-based Web sites. This product delivers a complete set of tools for Web design and development. Expression Web Designer is focused on the needs of professional Web designers seeking to build high-quality, standards-based Web sites for companies. It provides exceptional support for integrating XML, cascading style sheets (CSS), ASP.NET 2.0, XHTML, and other standard Web technologies into sites to make them more dynamic, interactive, and accessible.

SharePoint Designer 2007 is built specifically for information workers in an enterprise setting who are creating and customizing SharePoint Web sites and building workflow-enabled applications in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. SharePoint Designer 2007 provides these workers with versatile tools to produce more interactive Web pages that incorporate data from a wide variety of sources, as well as enable the support for existing business processes. SharePoint Designer 2007 also offers powerful reporting tools for the SharePoint platform. SharePoint Designer 2007 allows an enterprise's IT department to manage all these activities closely so that employees ultimately can be more productive in building and customizing SharePoint sites and applications.

Comparing SharePoint Designer 2007 and FrontPage 2003

The SharePoint Designer 2007 user interface closely resembles the user interface of FrontPage 2003. Microsoft has chosen to give the product a new name to emphasize that SharePoint Designer 2007 is now part of the SharePoint product family.

SharePoint Designer 2007 supports the same types of Web sites as FrontPage 2003 does. Examples of these types of Web sites are Web sites built with Windows SharePoint Services, disk-based Web sites, and Web sites that are managed via FrontPage Server Extensions.

When Do You Use SharePoint Designer 2007?

SharePoint Designer 2007 is ASP.NET 2.0-compliant and is targeted toward enterprise-solution creators and designers using SharePoint technology. SharePoint Designer 2007 supports technologies such as ASP.NET 2.0, cascading style sheets (CSS), and Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF). You can use SharePoint Designer 2007 to earily build no-code solutions. The following scenarios are examples of situations when using SharePoint Designer 2007 is useful:

• Tracking and reporting scenarios

• Designing lists and libraries to store data

• Making forms and views for presenting data

• Building application logic in the form of workflows

• Leveraging SharePoint Designer 2007 to aid in defining the user interface for the SharePoint platform

• Leveraging the SharePoint security system to define rights and roles for users of SharePoint Designer 2007

SharePoint Designer 2007 cannot be used to create custom Web Parts and controls, complex workflows, and custom form actions. If you want to do that, you need to use Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Designer.