Beginning SharePoint Designer 2010

Woodrow W. Windischman, Bryan Phillips, Asif Rehmani, Marcy Kellar

• Publisher: Wrox
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781118013892
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencia de la computación
• Subtopic: Aplicaciones empresariales

Teaching Web designers, developers, and IT professionals how to use the new version of SharePoint Designer

Covering both the design and business applications of SharePoint Designer, this complete Wrox guide brings readers thoroughly up to speed on how to use SharePoint Designer in an enterprise. You'll learn to create and modify web pages, use CSS editing tools to modify themes, use Data View to create interactivity with SharePoint and other data, and much more. Coverage includes integration points with Visual Studio, Visio, and InfoPath.

• Shows web designers, developers, and IT professionals how to use SharePoint Designer 2010 to customize Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 and Windows SharePoint Services 4.0
• Covers both the design and business application of SharePoint Designer 2010
• Delves into modifying and enhancing every aspect of your SharePoint site—not just the look and feel
• Explores creating and modifying web pages, how to add interactivity with SharePoint and other data, and using CSS editing tools to modify themes

With the explosive growth in SharePoint, this book is your key to customizing your SharePoint sites with SharePoint Designer 2010.

Part I

The Lay of the Land

Chapter 1: Exploring SharePoint Designer

Chapter 1

Exploring SharePoint Designer

What You Will Learn in This Chapter

• How SharePoint Designer fits into Microsoft's toolset
• SharePoint Designer's basic features
• How to create a SharePoint site
• How to open an existing SharePoint site
• How a SharePoint site is represented in SharePoint Designer
• How to change site-wide SharePoint properties
• Restricting what SharePoint Designer users can do

What Is SharePoint Designer 2010?

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 is a large and sophisticated web application. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that the tool meant to customize it—Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2010—is a large, sophisticated desktop application. Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2010 is the premier tool for customizing sites based on Microsoft SharePoint 2010. It provides features for:

• Creating and editing master pages and page layouts
• Creating and editing cascading style sheets (CSS)
• Designing and editing workflows
• Connecting SharePoint to various external data sources
• Creating and modifying lists, libraries, and views of data
• Managing virtually all other aspects of a user's experience in SharePoint 2010

One very important thing is not on this list: editing SharePoint content. Although SharePoint Designer 2010 does contain powerful page editing tools, these are primarily used in the service of editing the other elements described previously. SharePoint itself is a powerful web-based content management system. Site owners and users use these web-based tools to create and modify the content of their sites.

Your role as a user of SharePoint Designer is to customize the consistent presentation of that content (master pages and CSS), or rules by which it is gathered and manipulated (external data connections and workflow).

All in the Family

In the 2007 Microsoft Office System, Microsoft replaced many of the traditional user interface elements in several client applications, such as Microsoft Word, with what it calls the Fluent user interface, the most noticeable feature of which is a tabbed mega-toolbar called the ribbon. For 2010, this user interface has been expanded to include virtually all Microsoft client applications, including SharePoint Designer 2010. In addition, even SharePoint itself has been endowed with this very popular element (see Appendix B). Figure 1.1 shows an example of the ribbon in SharePoint Designer.

Figure 1.1

Many tabs on the ribbon are dynamic, or context sensitive, meaning that different tabs are available depending on what you are doing at the time. In Figure 1.1, for example, the tabs in the Code View Tools and List View Tools sections would only be visible simultaneously because the user is editing the design of a list view while the code view portion of SharePoint Designer's split was active. List views and the code view are described in detail later in this book.

A Backstage Pass

In the 2010 client products, Microsoft has taken the Fluent UI a step further. The Office 2007 applications had a Jewel menu that replaced the traditional File menu. For 2010, the name File has been restored, but the functions under that label have expanded even further. Rather than summoning a menu, clicking on the File tab brings forth a new element that Microsoft calls Backstage. Backstage is essentially a full-screen configuration page.

Most ribbon tabs affect a specific piece of a document, such as the font of a word, or the style of a table. Backstage allows you to work with items that affect either the application itself, or the document you are working on as a whole. Different Office applications expose different levels of functionality through Backstage as appropriate. Figure 1.2 shows the SharePoint Designer Backstage.

Figure 1.2

Try It Out Open a SharePoint Site

1. From the Start menu, select Microsoft Office, Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2010. (The File tab will be selected by default.) Observe that very little functionality is available, and many options are “grayed out.”

2. Click the large Open Site button.

3. In the Site Name box in the Open Site dialog, type the URL of your test SharePoint 2010 site, and click Open.

4. Observe the stages of the site opening process as displayed in the status box. When the opening process is complete, the Site tab is given focus, and you will see an overview of the site you have opened.

5. Click File to return to Backstage. Observe the different elements that are now “lit up” and available for selection.

Note

SharePoint Designer can be configured to open the most recently used site automatically. If this is the case on your installation, and a site has previously been opened, it will appear as if you have already completed up to Step 3 in the preceding Try It Out. You learn how to change this setting later in this chapter.

Most Try It Out exercises in this book require you to have a SharePoint 2010 site open in SharePoint Designer in order to follow along. Such a site is not provided with this book. Unless otherwise specified, you may use any edition of SharePoint 2010 and any site template as the basis for your exercises. Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010 and Microsoft Search Server Express 2010 are available—without licensing costs—directly from Microsoft. Many other editions and licensing options ...