1.1. Introducing SharePoint Designer

SharePoint is one of the fastest-growing Microsoft products and offers a platform for developing enterprise-level Web applications that focus on the sharing and collaboration of content and documents. In its most basic of definitions, SharePoint provides the infrastructure for creating and maintaining Web sites that can be used for a variety of Internet-based operations besides sharing Office or non-Office content and collaboration. You can later customize these Web sites that SharePoint creates to suit your business needs, format, or branding.

SharePoint Designer is Microsoft's premier product for Web site designers who are tasked with customizing and branding SharePoint Web sites. Although SharePoint Designer in its current release can be used for non-SharePoint Web site development, its full capability is exposed when you work with SharePoint Web sites. However, before I discuss SharePoint Designer and its features, I want to briefly mention its predecessor, FrontPage, and the origins of SharePoint Designer.

1.1.1. Exploring the legacy of FrontPage technologies

Microsoft acquired FrontPage quite a few years ago from a company called Vermeer Technologies Incorporated (VTI, an acronym you encounter a lot when exploring the internals of SharePoint Designer later in this chapter). FrontPage's Web site authoring and management techniques were really ahead of their time and allowed Web site developers to easily create Web sites on local computers and then push them to Web servers or even work directly on the Web site residing on the Web server. The underlying authoring techniques of FrontPage were exploited by a lot of other Microsoft products, such as Visual InterDev, Office, and Visual Studio.

The concept was simple: The FrontPage program installed on the client computer provided the client-side component that could be used for creating Web pages and designing Web sites. The Web server was set up with a server-side component — namely, FrontPage Server Extensions (FPSE) — that would communicate with the client-side component for providing the basic infrastructure for three operations:

• Moving content from the client machine to the Web server

• Authoring or modifying content directly on the Web server

• Enabling certain Web components that provide functionality for Web sites

These authoring technologies that FrontPage introduced are still very much alive and used by SharePoint Designer, Expression Web, and Office 2007 products when working with SharePoint and non-SharePoint sites.

FrontPage could be used to create Web pages and design Web sites by using a set of Web components and features offered with the product. These features included components such as hit counters, shared borders, link bars based on the navigation structure, and many more. The list of these components grew with each new version of FrontPage.

On the server side, FPSE provided the basis for the first SharePoint implementation offered with Office XP/2002. This release of SharePoint was called SharePoint Team Services (STS) and stemmed from a less-used ASP-based Office 2000 document management feature called Office Server Extensions (OSE). STS allowed developers to create Web sites by using Web site templates that were provided with the product. These Web sites provided basic collaboration and document management features, including document libraries and lists.

FrontPage XP/2002 became the client-side tool for customizing and modifying Web pages inside STS sites. FrontPage 2002 also provided for the interface that could be used to create new document libraries and lists (SharePoint content) as well as new SharePoint Web pages and Web sites, publishing STS sites from one Web server to another. All these SharePoint features were enabled in FrontPage 2002 only when an STS site was open in it and were not available for non-SharePoint sites.

This client-server relationship was thus established as the basis for the next versions of FrontPage and SharePoint. FrontPage 2003 was offered as the client-side designing tool for working with Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 (WSS v2). It could be used to develop SharePoint content and exploit the features offered by WSS v2 sites.

Following this relationship, SharePoint Designer was introduced as the designing tool for the current version of SharePoint, WSS v3, and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS). Although SharePoint Designer is backward-compatible to a certain extent with the previous versions of SharePoint, its complete set of features are exposed only when using it with WSS v3 and MOSS sites.

1.1.2. Comparing SharePoint Designer with FrontPage 2003

As discussed earlier, SharePoint Designer is the designing tool for the current release of SharePoint. SharePoint Designer inherits many of its features from FrontPage 2003. Besides these features and enhancements, SharePoint Designer makes available a set of new technologies and features, such as workflows, page layouts, etc., that SharePoint v3 exposes.

While I highlight key improvements in SharePoint Designer as compared to FrontPage 2003 throughout this book, Table 1.1 compares some of the major features and components available in FrontPage 2003 and SharePoint Designer.

Some of the differences shown throughout this book are apparent; SharePoint Designer is the newer version and exploits many features that the new SharePoint 3.0 itself has to offer. Workflows, for example, is a new technology that SharePoint 3.0 exposes to SharePoint Designer for creating advanced logic-based processes that could help in implementing common business actions and purposes. The ability to use ASP.NET 2.0 controls through a wizard-based approach is also new for SharePoint Designer, which now offers a simpler Visual Studio/Visual InterDev–like interface to work with ASP.NET 2.0 control properties. Some features, such as the Database Results Wizard and shared borders, are deprecated and have been replaced in favor of newer and better technologies. Throughout this book, I talk about these differences while also discussing the new features.

Although SharePoint Designer offers its full capabilities for SharePoint sites, you could be a Web site designer concentrating totally on non-SharePoint Web sites. In that case, the SharePoint features of SharePoint Designer might just be useless to you until you start developing for SharePoint, and you might want to invest in a trimmed-down version of SharePoint Designer, such as the current release of Expression Web, which is a subset of SharePoint Designer.

1.1.3. Choosing between Expression Web and SharePoint Designer

This choice is quite simple: If you as a Web site designer need to concentrate primarily on SharePoint sites, the obvious choice is SharePoint Designer. However, if you don't develop content for SharePoint sites, you can invest in Expression Web. Expression Web offers almost all the non-SharePoint features of SharePoint Designer, such as ASP.NET 2.0 controls, master pages, and CSS, but has the limitation that it can't open SharePoint sites. It lacks all the SharePoint capabilities that SharePoint Designer offers. So, if a non-SharePoint Web server hosts your Web site and you have no plans to develop SharePoint content, Expression Web can provide you with all the tools you need for your Web site development. The non-SharePoint interface for the current release of Expression Web and SharePoint Designer is essentially similar and thus you can also use this book as a reference for Expression Web.