You can open a site in SharePoint Designer from the browser or by opening SharePoint Designer first and then opening a site from within SharePoint Designer. You cannot open Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 or Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 sites with SharePoint Designer 2010. You can open a file in SharePoint Designer, such as an HTML file, that does not reside in a SharePoint site; however, to do so a SharePoint site must already be open in SharePoint Designer.

To open a site from within SharePoint Designer, use the following steps:

When you have a site already open in SharePoint Designer, you can open subsequent sites by clicking the File tab to display the Backstage view, and then click Sites in the left pane. Then under Open SharePoint Site, click Open Site. Alternatively, on the Subsites tab (which can be displayed by clicking Subsite in the Navigation pane), you can use the Open Site command in the Edit group. If you have a SharePoint site already open in SharePoint Designer, when you open additional sites, a new SharePoint Designer window opens.

To open a site in SharePoint Designer from the browser, use one of the following methods:

Figure 14-2. Opening SharePoint Designer from the Library tab in the browser.

When you use any of the browser commands to open SharePoint Designer but you do not have SharePoint Designer installed on your computer, and if you have an Internet connection, you will be presented with a dialog, (see Figure 14-3) from which you can download and install SharePoint 2010.

Figure 14-3. Installing SharePoint Designer 2010.

When you click Free Download, a File Download dialog box opens, with which you can install SharePoint Designer or save SharePointDesigner.exe to a location on your computer and install it at a later time. You can prevent the installation of SharePoint Designer, as you can any product, by using software restriction policies.

Don’t be put off by its name; SharePoint Designer is not aimed at just web designers. With SharePoint Designer, you can carry out similar tasks to the browser; however, you can now complete more tasks natively, without the need to jump back and forth between SharePoint Designer and the browser. For example, when you first open a site with SharePoint Designer, within the SharePoint Designer workspace, you are presented with a site’s summary page, as shown in Figure 14-4. This page provides you with key site information organized in five areas: Site Information, Customization, Settings, Permissions, and Subsites. You can use this page to change many site settings, manage permissions, and create new Subsites. You will see settings pages for other site artifacts, such as, for a list, library, master page, and workflow.

Figure 14-4. Site summary page and SharePoint Designer components.

Notice also in Figure 14-4 that SharePoint Designer has a redesigned user interface (UI) that uses the Microsoft Office Fluent UI. The ribbon contains one or more tabs, and it works in a similar manner to the server ribbon when a SharePoint site is displayed in the browser—that is, the tabs are dynamic and context sensitive. The commands are organized into groups, and if there is not sufficient space on the ribbon, then the commands are displayed as an icon or options in a drop-down menu.

Similar to other Microsoft applications, SharePoint Designer has a Quick Access Toolbar that contains a set of commands that are independent of the currently active ribbon tab. You can add commands to the toolbar, which is very useful when you find that you frequently use a SharePoint Designer command. For example, if you often create a Web Part page or create a list or library, you can add these commands to the Quick Access Toolbar. To add commands to the Quick Access Tool bar, complete one of the following steps:

In Figure 14-4, in the Navigation pane, selecting the first site object provides a summary of the SharePoint site, and makes the Site tab in the ribbon available. When you click the icon to the left of a Subsite in the Subsites area, the Site tab set appears, which contains one tab, the Subsites tab. If you then select the Lists And Libraries site object in the Navigation pane, a gallery page displays a list of site artifacts, which in this case is lists and libraries, and in the ribbon, the Site tab and the Site tab set are replaced with the List And Libraries tab, as shown in Figure 14-7.

Figure 14-7. The Lists And Libraries site object.

The workspace breadcrumb can be compared to Windows Explorer in as much as you can drill down and step upward, as shown in Figure 14-8. Use the back and forward arrows in the breadcrumb as you would use then in the browser to display previous or following content.

Figure 14-8. Use the breadcrumbs to navigate to site artifacts.

The status bar is context sensitive and provides you with additional tools and information, depending on what is displayed in the workspace. It also contains a Log In command with which you can log in as a different user, similar to the Sign In As Different User command that appears when you click the down-arrow to the right of your name in the upper-right corner of a SharePoint site in the browser.

You might have also noticed that when you open a site in SharePoint Designer 2010, you are no longer presented with the file and folder structure of the site, known as the Web Site URL Structure. Although the URL structure in a SharePoint site does not exist—it is created from a combination of files from the SharePoint server and content in the SQL content database—it is what web developers expect to see in a web editing tool for non-SharePoint sites.

The URL structure, which was the default view in SharePoint Designer 2007, did not make it easy for business users to find SharePoint objects—you had to know where each of the site objects lived within that URL structure; for example, master pages can be found in the _catalog/masterpage folder. Now in SharePoint Designer 2010, the Navigation pane allows Site Collection and site owners to browse easily between the site objects that they wish to create and manage. You can now easily create a custom application by creating a Subsite, lists and libraries on that Subsite, associate site columns, content types and workflows with those lists and libraries, as well as manage the security groups, without leaving SharePoint Designer.

You can use SharePoint Designer to add static content, such as text or images to your webpages; however, its strength is to help present and manipulate content to develop no-code solutions and customizations that meet business needs. These solutions and customizations can then be exported from SharePoint Designer and handed over to the IT department, where they can be imported into Visual Studio, making SharePoint Designer a rapid application, prototyping, no-code tool. When you have developed as far as you can by using the browser and SharePoint Designer, the developer can take your modifications as a starting point.

The URL structure of a site is still available by clicking All Files in the Navigation pane, as shown in Figure 14-9.

Figure 14-9. Click the All Files in the Navigation pane to view the URL structure of a SharePoint site.

SharePoint Designer has historically been a very powerful and useful tool for customizing SharePoint sites and creating solutions. However, the long lasting implications of using SharePoint Designer 2007 and its predecessor, Microsoft Office FrontPage 2003, on SharePoint sites, caused organizations to prohibit the installation of SharePoint Designer or to limit its use to all but a few trained users.

When the save command was clicked in SharePoint Designer 2007 or FrontPage 2003, SharePoint would unnecessarily break the link between a page and its site definition file stored on the SharePoint Server, resulting in what is known as a customized or unghosted page. A copy of the page from the SharePoint server would be stored in the SQL server content database. The customizing or unghosting of a page was not always made obvious to the untrained user. SharePoint Designer 2007 and FrontPage 2003 also did not provide an easy method for controlling the level of modifications that users could carry out with SharePoint Designer.

Customizing pages by using SharePoint Designer 2010, as with SharePoint Designer 2007, in most cases does not adversely affect the performance of a page—it is more of a maintenance issue, which is most often experienced when upgrading from one version of SharePoint to another, or when an organization implements a major change to the look and feel of their installation.

SharePoint Designer 2010 contains many improvements and implements a “safe by default” approach that places reasonable limits around its usage so that citizen developers do not accidently create solutions that have a negative effect. You can still customize a page in SharePoint Designer; however, first you need to be allowed to customize a page, and second, you must explicitly change your edit mode to advanced mode before you can customize a page.

SharePoint 2010 implements a new set of settings at the web application and Site Collection levels that can be used to prevent or restrict the usage of SharePoint Designer. These are SharePoint Designer usage settings and not security settings. When configured at the web application level, these settings affect all users, including Site Collection administrators for all Site Collections and sites within the web application. When they are configured at the Site Collection level, they apply only to site owners and designers for sites within that Site Collection.

At both web application and Site Collection levels, there are now four settings that allow or disallow the following SharePoint Designer usages (when a web application is created, by default all four security settings are selected):

You cannot use these options to control the usage of SharePoint Designer for different groups of people or to apply different usage rules on a per-site basis within the same Site Collection.

When any of the out-of-the-box site templates are used to create the root site of a Site Collection, site owners and designers can use SharePoint Designer; however, they cannot detach pages from site definitions, customize master pages or page layouts, or see the URL structure of their websites. Site collection owners are only restricted by the settings at the web application level and are not affected by the selection of check boxes on the SharePoint Designer Settings page at the Site Collection level.

If you are using SharePoint Server 2010 and the root site of a Site Collection was created by using a publishing site, then all four check boxes on the SharePoint Designer settings page at the Site Collection level are selected.

To apply restrictions at the web application level, complete the following steps. Note that you must be a SharePoint Server administrator to complete these steps:

Alternatively, in the SharePoint 2010 Central Administration website, you can configure SharePoint Designer usage settings at the web application level by going to the General Application Settings page. Click Configure SharePoint Designer settings to display the SharePoint Designer Settings page, and then select the appropriate web application in the Web Application section.

To configure SharePoint Designer settings at the Site Collection level, complete the following steps. Note that you must be a Site Collection administrator to complete these steps:

Set-SPDesignerSettings -WebApplication http://wideworldimporters '
   -AllowRevertFromTemplate $False -ShowURLStructure $False

Get-SPDesignerSettings -WebApplication http://wideworldimporters

Get-SPSite http://wideworldimporters/sites/hr | select *

Get-SPSite http://wideworldimporters/sites/basic).AllowDesigner=$False

http://wideworldimporters/sites/hr
http://wideworldimporters/sites/marketing
http://widworldimporters/sites/sales

$content = Get-Content sitecollection.txt
$content | ForEach-Object {
   (Get-SPSite $_).AllowDesigner = $False}

$content | % {
  Get-SPSite $_ |
  select ServerRelativeUrl, AllowDesigner }