SharePoint Designer 2007 is free!

By: Rob Fisch   |   Updated: 2010-03-02   |   Comments   |   Related: > Sharepoint Design

Problem

I've heard that Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2007 is a great administrator and designer tool for SharePoint. What are some of the compelling features, how do I get it and how much does it cost?

Solution

Let's begin with the most important part of this tip...

On April 1, 2009, Microsoft made SharePoint Designer 2007 available for free. This is great news for SharePoint administrators and designers.

Many remember Microsoft's Frontpage product. This was last released in 2003. In 2007, Frontpage was replaced by SharePoint Designer, which has all of the Frontpage functionality plus added SharePoint features.

Here's a short list of things you can do with SharePoint Designer that are either impossible, or impractical to do in the regular web interface.

• Creating/editing SharePoint Master Pages and site wide Cascading Style Sheets.
• Create customized workflows with a set of controls that are not available in the web interface.
• Controlling multiple checked out files in a single interface.
• Manual backups (and restoring) of individual sites in both WSS3 and MOSS 2007.
• Creating Data View Web Parts.
• Create custom List Forms are edit existing ones.

These are but a few of the features. There are many more.

You can download SharePoint Designer 2007 from here:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=baa3ad86-bfc1-4bd4-9812-d9e710d44f42

..or try searching it from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads

Note that SharePoint Designer 2007 will not work with SharePoint 2010.

Next Steps

• Check out MSSQLTips.com for great information about Microsoft SQL Server.

About the author

Rob Fisch has worked with SQL Server since version 6.5 as a dba, developer, report writer and data warehouse designer.

This author pledges the content of this article is based on professional experience and not AI generated.

View all my tips