Many good books exist on the subject of web site design,
and plenty of these books tailor to SharePoint-specific design. It was
not my goal to compete with such publications, but to cover the core
enhancements in SharePoint 2013, which include the Design Manager and
support for a new version of SharePoint Designer 2013.
Since the first release of SharePoint 2007,
Microsoft has released a version of SharePoint Designer to pair with
the release of SharePoint. SharePoint Designer is a free Windows
installed application that provides design and configuration
capabilities for advanced users.
Unlike Office applications, SharePoint Designer
does not mix and match well with different versions of SharePoint.
SharePoint Designer 2007 works with SharePoint 2007, SharePoint
Designer 2010 works with SharePoint 2010, and a new release of
SharePoint Designer 2013 works with SharePoint 2013. I can only guess
that Microsoft adopted this approach because Designer contains many
capabilities that rely on specific functionality present in SharePoint,
and cross-version support would complicate the product.
Before providing you an overview of SharePoint
Designer, I should mention that Designer is not just a design tool (as
its name suggests). You can administer and configure many areas of
SharePoint with Designer. For example, you can open list settings and
change the configuration for all lists, which for some is more
desirable than the SharePoint browser interface.
Note SharePoint Designer is not just a design tool—you can perform some configuration and administration functions with it also.
SharePoint Designer 2013 does not ship with SharePoint Server 2013. In fact, some administrators are quite
happy never needing to install Designer. Users had to pay for earlier
versions of Designer, but now the application is free. You can download
the latest version of SharePoint Designer 2013 from http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=30346.
You need not install Designer on the same server as SharePoint—it is a
good practice not to—because SharePoint Designer communicates with
SharePoint using the SharePoint Server web services.
Like most Microsoft applications, Designer
ships as both 32-bit and 64-bit. It is important to know which version
you want to install before downloading it. If you have any other Office
applications installed you must ensure that you download and install
the same architecture version of Designer. SharePoint Designer 64-bit
will not install on a server that has Office 32-bit, and vice versa.
Note You can download the latest version of SharePoint Designer from http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=30346.
Figure 1 shows a screenshot of my installation
of SharePoint Designer 2013 after I opened my publishing site
collection. SharePoint Designer 2013 looks and feels much like its
Office 2013 siblings with the Windows 8 brand. From a usability
standpoint, Designer has a similar layout to the previous version, with
the left pane containing site objects and the right side panes showing
open object in context. Similar to the previous version, SharePoint
Designer 2013 also includes a ribbon.
New Features
SharePoint 2013 includes all of the existing capabilities of the previous version with some new features and enhancements.
I briefly touched on workflow changes in SharePoint 2013, as part of my
demonstration on business intelligence. SharePoint 2013 includes the
same .NET 3.5 workflow capabilities you had in SharePoint 2010, but
.NET 4.0 now hosts workflow in the cloud with Windows Azure. To take
advantage of the new workflow features in SharePoint Designer, you must
configure Windows Azure Workflow.
SharePoint Designer 2013 now allows you to create state machine based
workflows; previously you needed Visual Studio to create state machine
workflows because Designer only supported creation of serial workflows.
SharePoint Designer 2013 includes several enhancements to the visual
workflow designer, supports loops, integrates with REST services, and
allows you to package workflows.
Probably one of the biggest changes in
SharePoint Designer 2013 is no Design View. The Design View used to
show a visual view of a file while editing. You could switch between
Design View and Code View and configure SharePoint Design into split
view (showing both). SharePoint Designer 2013 now supports only Code
View for editing files. I can only speculate on why Microsoft chose to
depreciate this functionality—word is that Designer’s editor is not in
line with recent versions of Internet Explorer, which supports HTML 5.
The change does have some repercussions on how some users use Designer
from a WYSIWYG perspective. Editing Data View Web Parts is one
significant loss without the Design View, since you can no longer see a
view of the Data View Web Part populated with data in the editor.
Note SharePoint Designer 2013 dropped the Design View of files in the editor.
