SharePoint® 2007 Collaboration For Dummies®

Chapter 13. Customizing Your SharePoint Site with Office SharePoint Designer 2007

In This Chapter

• Becoming familiar with the Office SharePoint Designer 2007 interface and environment

• Opening your SharePoint site in SharePoint Designer

• Creating a custom SharePoint workflow with Workflow Designer

Office SharePoint Designer 2007, the subject of this chapter, is a standalone Web designing program that Microsoft developed specifically for working with SharePoint sites. As you're very much aware if you've had the opportunity to peruse the other earlier chapters of this book, SharePoint Designer is not necessary for performing routine SharePoint customization and maintenance. In fact, the vast majority of SharePoint knowledge workers get along perfectly fine without the program when it comes to tailoring their SharePoint sites for the particular needs of the teams they supervise and collaborate with.

Nevertheless, Office SharePoint Designer 2007 does have its uses, even for the nonprogrammer with no intention of ever trying his hand at XML-driven Web solutions. SharePoint Designer's most notable use (and the real reason for including this chapter) is its very powerful Workflow Designer. This wizard enables even the most code-phobic people to develop custom workflows for a SharePoint site to supplement the default three-state workflow template, which is the only one available to you if you're using Windows SharePoint Services without MOSS 2007. (See Chapter 10 for details about the three-state ...