In my line of work, I’m constantly demonstrating SharePoint functionality to people. Having a good working virtual machine is critical to make that happen (and I have several ). However, if you don’t want to create one from scratch, you can go ahead and download the virtual machine (vhd) that Microsoft put on their site right here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=751fa0d1-356c-4002-9c60-d539896c66ce&displaylang=en

This machine is kind of hard to search for on the net. The page that it resides on is labeled “2010 Information Worker Demonstration and Evaluation Virtual Machine (RTM)”. You can search for that or click on the link above. Your choice.

Don’t forget the fact that you need a 64-bit platform to run this machine. Also, this machine Has to be run in a Hyper-v environment. I had blogged about the requirements earlier so check that post out first (http://blog.sharepointelearning.com/want-to-get-your-hands-on-sharepoint-2010/) before getting started. Good Luck!

We’re back again with another free webinar. The content of this webinar was presented as a session by me at the Microsoft Connections 2010 conference in Amsterdam last week. The concepts presented in this session are already available as videos to the subscribers of SharePoint-Videos.com. I’ll be presenting this session in a webinar format to be held this Thursday, Jan 28th.

For this webinar, fundamental knowledge of SharePoint (2007 or 2010) concepts is assumed. Webinar will be held on Jan 28th at 12:00pm Eastern time. You can get more information and register for this webinar here:

https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/884796449

This article is the third in the series trying to demystify all that SharePoint Designer 2010 has to offer. Check out the other two articles here:

User Interfaces of SharePoint Designer 2010

Site Level Customizations and Settings using SharePoint Designer 2010

Also, related to this article, you can watch the SharePoint Designer 2010 Workflow videos we have available here:

Create a Site Workflow and modify its form using InfoPath

An end to end process using InfoPath 2010 for forms and Visio 2010 and SharePoint Designer 2010 for Workflows

Create Reusable Workflows using SharePoint Designer 2010 and attach to Content Types

Note: I am trying something new with this blog entry and would Love your feedback (in the comments area). Check out the animation at the bottom of this blog entry. If you like it and would like me to continue using this feature, let me know please. Thanks!

Types of Workflows

The Workflow Designer in SharePoint Designer 2010 is used to create workflows on the currently opened SharePoint site. There are 3 types of workflows that can be created using SharePoint Designer: List, Reusable, Site.

Each type of workflow has its reason for existence and will be (should be) used by used by Site Admins, Power Users and Designers of the site. Workflows in SharePoint sites are used to create robust processes using components of the site. They can interact with users, lists and libraries. The other ways to create workflows on top of SharePoint are Browser based and using Visual Studio. Out-of-box browser based workflows are good for many scenarios, but they are simpler in nature and cannot be modified further using the browser. While Visual Studio workflows are extremely powerful and scalable, but require coding skills to implement.

Following is a quick breakdown of how the 3 SharePoint Designer workflows are used and why you would use them:

List Workflow – Using this mechanism, you attach the workflow directly to a list or library on the site. Use this workflow when you are making a workflow that’s very specific to a list or library and does not need to be later used on a different list or library.

Reusable Workflow – This type of workflow is created with reusability in mind. Create a reusable workflow when you intend to attach it to a content type and use that content type in a list or library.

Site Workflow – Site based workflow does not require to be attached to a list or library. It works on the site itself. Use this workflow if you do not want to restrict the automated process to a list or library on the site. For example, you can use the site workflow to take a survey of the site members or to execute a process on a Document Set (new functionality in SharePoint 2010).

You don’t necessarily have to start creating a workflow from scratch. The out-of-box workflow templates (Approval, Collect Feedback and Collect Signatures) that can be used in the browser can also be extended using the workflow designer. Meaning, if you like the way these workflows work, but just want to tweak it to your liking, you can do that! These workflows are categorized as Globally Reusable Workflows and are visible and available at every site in the site collection.

A word of caution: Be careful while working with these! If you modify any of these from directly the root site of your site collection, then you are modifying the actual workflow template that’s in use at your site collection. Whatever changes you make will take effect everywhere in your site collection where this workflow is being used. If you click on any of these workflows from a subsite, it will instead inform you that a copy of the workflow will be made that you can further modify (I would recommend doing this and Not changing the out-of-box workflow template).

Workflow Designer Interface

Let’s look at the workflow designer interface that’s used to configure the workflows. You get to the design interface by either creating a new workflow or by clicking on an existing workflow and then clicking on the Edit Workflow link on the summary page of the workflow.

The workflow designer interface is where you define the complete logic of the workflow. To put it simply, SharePoint Designer workflows consist of steps which are executed sequentially in the order they are placed in the workflow designer. Clicking on the Step button in the ribbon inserts a new step in the workflow designer interface. Within the step, you can place Conditions and Actions. Clicking on the Condition button will show you all of the conditions that are available.

A conditional logic statement is used to look out for a specific possibility. If the condition is true, then whatever is encapsulated within the conditional block will be executed. Otherwise, the workflow process will move on to the next conditional logic statement (if one exists). Programmers have been using the conditional logic construct (If… Else If… Else) for decades now. Now information workers also have the power to write their own business logic without coding!

Actions are the actual statements which execute a certain activity (ex: Creating a List Item, Checking in an Item, Sending Email etc). The image below shows a snapshot of a partial list of the actions available in the designer environment.

Parallel Block

Each of the actions and conditions can be moved around rather easily within the step or even from one step to another. Just click on the action/condition you would like to move and click the Move Up or Move Down button in the ribbon. The default nature of the actions you place in the workflow steps is sequential. The first action takes place then the next and so on. This is made evident by the word then that appears preceding every action within the step after the first action. There will be many instances where you need the actions to take place in parallel. For example, if an action calls for collecting data from a user, the process will not move on to the next action until that action is accomplished and the user who the data is being fetched from provides the data. If you want actions to fire in parallel, you can use the Parallel Block functionality. You first start by placing the parallel block within the step right up close to the actions you want to run in parallel and then by clicking on the Parallel Block button in the ribbon.

The below animation highlights the following:

• Moving actions up and down
• Parallel block

Remember that there is no Undo button in the workflow designer so that if you make a mistake, you just need to undo it manually the old fashioned way .

That’s it for now. I’ll be back with more information on workflows in my next article. There are still many things to be discussed such as workflow settings, impersonation steps, parallel blocks, association columns, nested steps and a whole lot more. Stay tuned…

In the last article, I described the screens and interfaces that users would interact with in SharePoint Designer 2010 (SPD). This article will dig into working with specifically the settings and customizations you can make at the SharePoint site level using SPD. So let’s dive in!

As far as site creation is concerned, SPD can be used to create subsites using any of the available site templates. However, SharePoint Designer cannot be used to create a top level site or a site collection itself. You would need to perform these actions using any of the following options:

• Central Administration
• PowerShell
• Programmatically using the object model
• Stsadm.exe (this utility was heavily used in administering SharePoint 2007. However, PowerShell is recommended for SharePoint 2010 administration)

SharePoint Designer can open any existing SharePoint 2010 sites (SharePoint 2007 is not supported). The image below shows the Summary Page of a site. Each area on the summary page is marked with a number. Right below the image, each of the areas is discussed in detail.

Site Information

1.  The summary page is broken up into multiple sections. These sections show you a variety of information about the site. The sections themselves are not customizable. More cannot be added and the existing ones cannot be deleted. You can minimize these sectional panels by clicking on them, but that’s about it.

2.  Title and Description of site are completely configurable. Just click on the existing wording and start typing to change it. Once done, don’t forget to press the Save button at the top left to commit your changes.

3.  The Web Address link takes you directly to the site’s home page in the browser.

4.  SharePoint Version – The build number of the SharePoint deployment

Server Version – Just shows you that SharePoint is running on Internet Information Services

5.  Total Storage Used – This number is deceiving. Upon first look, it seems like this is site focused. It’s not. This number shows you the current storage used by the site collection.

% Available Storage Used – Quota templates can be created through Central Administration and assigned to a site collection. If the quota is set, this value would show the % of quota already used up.

Customization

6.  Edit site home page – The first thing a site admin would usually do is to edit the home page and modify its content. That’s why this link is available here in the customization section. Clicking this link will open up the home page (Home.aspx) of the site in safe editing mode. The safe editing mode makes sure that none of the edits in the page will cause it to become customized (or unghosted). This also means that the Master Page, which provides the chrome of the site, cannot be customized in this mode. There is another mode (Advanced) available if needed. You can get to Advanced mode by going to the Home.aspx page through the Site Pages library section in SPD.

7.  Change site theme – Changing a site’s theme is not supported within SPD. When you click on this link, it takes you to the page in the browser where you can apply any one of the available themes to the site.

Settings

8. Display Quick Launch – Shows/hides the Quick Launch of the site

Enable Tree View – Shows/hides the Tree View of the site

Notes:

1. It’s a good idea to use one and not both. Otherwise, you will end up with links to the same resources in two different places thus confusing your users.
2. Both show links which are security trimmed.
3. Quick Launch is configurable so you can hide or show links to site components as needed to not clutter up the navigation too much.
4. Tree View shows all of the site components that the end user has permission to see.

Recommendation:
Use Quick Launch for a nicely grouped organization of your site components.

9.  Enable Site RSS Feeds – Enables/disables the RSS feed for the site. This is a good way for end users to keep abreast of changes happening to their site by subscribing to the site’s RSS feed.

Subsites

10.  The list of subsites directly under this site appears here. This view is also security trimmed so that if a user does not have access to a site, he won’t see that site in this list.

Permissions

11.  This view shows the SharePoint groups who currently have permissions on the site. It also shows what permission level each group has. Using this section, you can also configure user permissions for the site. Security configuration options within SPD are a deep topic and will be covered in another article.

Hopefully, this post gave you a good perspective on the type of site level setting and customization options available within SharePoint Designer 2010. Future articles will attempt to detail other areas of this application.

In my first post regarding SharePoint Designer 2010 (SPD 2010), I took a shot at introducing SPD at a very high level. Going on forward, I will be creating individual posts which will dig deeper into each of the areas of SPD. This post will focus on the user interfaces of SPD (that would be the stuff you see when you open up SPD and what does it all mean).

For a video tour of SPD 2010 interfaces, watch the videos here.

A Site Administrator or a Designer of a SharePoint Site are the primary folks who will want to look into using SPD to create solutions on top of their SharePoint sites. Let’s assume You are that person. You are looking at your SharePoint site and thinking “there has got to be more I can do with this thing than what the browser allows me to do”. You are absolutely correct! You have the rights to create some powerful solutions, but the internet browser as an application has limitations on what it can do. For example, if you wanted to create a data connection from your site to a source of data that you have access to, the browser is not the tool to do this with. Visual Studio can obviously be used to accomplish this, but then it requires programming experience. Don’t know how to code? No worries! This is a job that’s well suited for SPD. Similarly, if you are looking to create robust business processes (or workflows) on top of your sites, SPD is the answer for that as well. So let’s see exactly where these things and more are located within the SPD interface.

Backstage

The first thing to do is to download SPD 2010. Open up SPD and you will see the Backstage environment first.

Backstage is now a standard interface that is built into all Office 2010 applications. Think of it like the old File menu in Office 2003. In fact, the tab that shows the Backstage options is called File as well. When you first start SPD, you will need to use the Backstage to either open an existing SharePoint 2010 site or create a new one. Keep in mind a couple of things here:

• Only SharePoint sites can be managed and customized in SharePoint Designer 2010.
• SharePoint Designer 2010 is not backwards compatible and cannot be used to open sites in SharePoint 2007 or earlier products.

The Backstage continues to be helpful after you open up a site in SPD (click on the File menu to access it). A site as a container needs to be populated with information and processes before it can have any value to the end user. Backstage can be used as a quick way to add Pages, Lists and Workflows to your site.

Once you have a site opened in SPD, you see the three major interface components: Navigation Pane, Ribbon and Summary Page. Let’s dig into each of these separately.

Navigation Pane

The left navigation pane in SPD provides access to all of the components of a SharePoint site. The links in this pane are all security trimmed. If you don’t have access to something, you won’t even see it there (for example, the Master Pages link would be hidden if Enable Customizing Master Pages and Layout Pages option is unchecked in the SharePoint Designer Settings within Site Collection Administration).

Following are all of the options in the navigation pane and a brief explanation for each:

<Site Name> (SPeL in the screenshot above)

Shows the summary page with information about the site at a high level. Site permissions, site navigation settings and any subsites underneath this site are all displayed here.

Lists and Libraries

Shows all of the lists and libraries that currently exist on the site. This is a security trimmed view and will not show items that a user does not have permissions to.

Workflows

Three types of workflows can be created in SPD: List, Reusable and Site. In addition, the built in workflows (Approval, Collect Feedback and Collect Signatures) can be copied and modified. All of the workflows that currently exist on the site are listed in this view.

Site Pages

This shows the Wiki page library called Site Pages that gets created automatically for every new site. The home page of the site is stored here. All pages contained in this library are wiki pages. Each wiki page can be organically linked to other pages within the same library.

Site Assets

This library gets created automatically for every site. It can be used to store images that are shown on wiki pages of the site. In addition, site assets such as javascript, xml, css and solution files (wsp) are all stored here for the site.

Content Types

The content types for this site and from the parent site are all visible here.

Site Columns

All site based columns for this site and the parent site are visible in this view.

External Content Types

External content types represent connections to data in back-end Line of Business (LOB) systems. These connections are created using the Business Connectivity Services (BCS) which is installed as a service application among other services in the farm. This view shows all of the connections not just on this site but the whole site collection.

Data Sources

SharePoint sites can create connections directly to a variety of external data sources such as databases, web services (both SOAP and REST services) and xml files. The data sources section in the navigation pane shows all of the existing connections.

Master Pages

The master pages section shows the master pages that are available to be used for the site. Default.master, minimal.master and v4.master are available by default in a team site. If others are created, they would appear here as well.

Site Groups

SharePoint groups are used as a container for Active Directory users and groups. All the SharePoint groups, whether they have permissions on the site or not, available in the entire site collection appear here.

Subsites

Shows the subsites directly below this site. This list of sites is security trimmed. If the logged in user does not have access to a particular subsite, he will not see that subsite in this list.

All Files

This view shows the URL structure of the web site. The subsites, lists, libraries, hidden folders and more all appear within this folder tree view.

Ribbon

The ribbon that appears on top of the SharePoint Designer 2010 environment provides the fluent user interface which has now been rolled out to all of Office 2010 applications. The ribbon provides a quick and easy way to perform actions on objects that are currently in context. For example, if you are looking at the Workflows section in the navigation pane, you will see the options for creating new workflows and working with existing workflows in the ribbon.

In addition to the default options in the ribbon, additional functionality “lights up” as specific objects on the page are put into context. In the screenshot below, the focus is on the picture which is inside of a table structure. So as a result, the ribbon shows two additional tabs – one for Picture Tools and the other for Table Tools.

The ribbon also respects SharePoint security and it will disable the options which the logged in user does not have permission to use.

Summary Page

The summary page shows the metadata and settings of the object (ex: Workflow, List, Library, Page etc) that’s selected in the navigation pane. You already saw an example of this earlier in the post (summary page for the site). The summary page consists of several sections of information about the object. These sections cannot be removed or customized. The screenshot below shows the summary page of a SharePoint group. You can get there by going to Site Groups in the navigation pane and then clicking on one of the SharePoint groups.

In the screenshot above, you can see the various sections showing settings for the SharePoint group Designers. For example, you can see that there are three members in this group and that only the group members can see the membership of this group and not everyone. By providing these types of settings in the summary page, we are given the opportunity to quickly and easily make changes as needed without having to go to the browser and deal with the server postbacks after each click.

This post showed the interfaces of SharePoint Designer 2010 that users will be interacting with. In future posts, I’ll be exploring each area of this product deeper to give you a better understanding of how you can utilize its capabilities to create robust solutions in your environment.

On Dec 8th, I’ll be presenting a session at the Power Up with SharePoint online conference. It’s a free conference. You can check it out and register here.

My session will be on Reporting on Lists, Libraries, and SQL data using Data Views in SharePoint Designer 2007. After the session, I’ll be available for a Q & A session. Also, my co-contributor on the sharepoint-videos.com site, Wendy Henry will be presenting the keynote for this conference. In addition, SharePoint gurus Michael Noel and Colin Spence are performing sessions as well.

So come on by if you have time and join us.

There are two versions of SharePoint Server 2010 beta available to the public:

SharePoint Server 2010 (Enterprise Client Access License features)

For organizations looking to expand their business collaboration platform to enable advanced scenarios. Use the Enterprise capabilities of SharePoint to fully interoperate with external line-of-business applications, web services, and Microsoft Office client applications; make better decisions with rich data visualization, dashboards, and advanced analytics; and build robust forms and workflow-based solutions.

SharePoint Server 2010 for Internet Sites, Enterprise

For organizations looking to create customer-facing public internet sites and private extranets using the full enterprise capabilities of SharePoint. This provides full SharePoint Enterprise functionality and no other technical limits.

Download either of them from here:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/ee388573.aspx

Keep in mind that you need a 64 bit environment to install SharePoint 2010 on. Check out my earlier post for the link to hardware requirements or choices for running it in a virtual environment.

We’re back again with another free webinar. A few weeks ago at the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2009, I presented a session on SharePoint Designer 2010 Workflows which have been vastly improved in this release of SharePoint. In addition to talking about SPD Workflows, I will show the integration points with Visio and InfoPath. I’ll be presenting this session in a webinar format to be held this Thursday, Dec 3rd.

For this webinar, fundamental SharePoint (2007 or 2010) knowledge is assumed. Webinar will be held on Dec 3rd at 12:00pm Eastern time. You can get more information and register for this webinar here:

https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/333716056

With so much information coming out now about SharePoint 2010 and related technologies, I’m sure many are wondering how they can get their hands on the actual software. Well, the public beta is scheduled for this month (November 2009). However, this does not mean that you will automatically be able to download it. You need to pre-register first to participate in the beta. Here is the page where you can pre-register: http://sharepoint2010.microsoft.com/try-it/Pages/Trial.aspx.

Before you go to pre-register however, you should also consider the hardware requirements for installing SharePoint 2010. If you plan to run it on a physical server, make sure it’s a 64bit machine. On the other hand, if you want to play with it in a virtual environment, then here are your options:

• Hyper-V
• Mount the vhd using Windows 7 and boot directly into it
• VMWare technologies

I used to have many virtual machines for SharePoint 2007 (in fact I still do) which were created in Virtual PC 2007. Virtual PC does not support 64-bit so that’s out of the question now

At the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2009, I had the distinct pleasure to present the Introduction to SharePoint Designer 2010 session. The early estimates are that over 1000 people attended that session. I personally had a real good time talking about SharePoint Designer since, aside from the facts that it’s my favorite tool to customize SharePoint and that I co-authored the book on SharePoint Designer 2007, so many enhancements have been made to this product that I didn’t have to use the “maybe this feature will be included in the next version” answer even once in the session Q&A! Awesome! .

As they say, best things in life are Free

First, let’s talk about the price of SharePoint Designer 2010 (SPD 2010)… well, or the lack of a price tag. Just like SPD 2007, SPD 2010 will also be a free product. Once it’s available (it will be released with SharePoint 2010 itself which is going to be sometime in the first half of 2010), it will be available at the following site: http://www.microsoft.com/spd. The question that might come to mind is “does this mean that Microsoft will not be further enhancing the product or supporting it fully since it has gone down the free route”. The answer I can confidentially say is Absolutely Not! The product is and will be supported as part of your SharePoint deployment. The reason Microsoft has decided to make the product free is because they did not want the price point of the product to be the barrier in trying to customize and extend SharePoint to its full potential (before jumping into code). You can only do so much within the web browser window. To take ultimate advantage of your SharePoint deployment, it is almost (dare I say) a necessity to use either SharePoint Designer or Visual Studio.

What’s in a Name anyway

The last word in the name of this product confuses many people who first hear about it (IMHO). SharePoint Designer to them insinuates that it must be a product for people who need to do branding or styling in SharePoint. While it’s true that SPD is really good at letting you apply style sheets to your sites, modify existing SharePoint themes, alter or create new Master Pages etc, this is only one part of its functionality. In my own case, for example, I use SPD for all the non-branding reasons. I use it to create end to end solutions on top of SharePoint using functionality such as the Data View web part, Workflow designer, manipulating web part zones, creating page layouts, using the built in reports etc. just to name a few. I truly believe and always mention to my customers to very seriously consider using SharePoint Designer in their environment to take full advantage of their SharePoint investment.

The bells and whistles of SharePoint Designer 2010

In my session at SPC, I presented 10 features of SharePoint Designer 2010. I also did plenty of demos related to these features. Whether you attended the conference or not, you can find the video demos for all of them at the SharePoint-Videos.com site here: http://www.sharepoint-videos.com/free-sharepoint-sharepoint-designer-and-infopath-2010-videos/. The features that I highlighted are listed below. Keep in mind, that there are more great things about SPD 2010 then are listed below. Also, not all of them are new, but they are all very useful. This is just to give you a taste of the power of SPD.

1. New User Experience with Summary Pages, Ribbon and Quick Launch navigation
   

   Just like the rest of the Microsoft Office suite, SPD also now has a Ribbon on top that changes depending on the object (site, list, workflow etc) you are focused on. Of course there is a learning curve if you are not comfortable with ribbons yet, however, once you do get comfortable with it, it makes you Really productive and efficient! The Summary Pages show you the settings and summary of an object that you are currently viewing. For example, if you are focused on a list, it will show you the name, description, views, forms etc for the list. The Quick Launch navigation on the side gives you a quick way to get to different categories of objects within the site (lists, workflows, site pages etc.). Overall, it’s easier to navigate a SharePoint site using this new user experience.

   

2. Creating SharePoint Content structure
   

   Once you start out with working in a SharePoint site collection, the types of things you will need to create will consist of subsites, lists for content, and pages to display the information among other things. While creating these objects, you will need to manipulate their name, description, schema and other settings as needed. You can do all of this in the browser or you can do it in SPD. My reason for doing this in SPD is that it’s much faster and efficient than going to the web browser and waiting for each page to load after clicking on a link to, let’s say, change the title and description of the site. The web browser is much slower than using the SPD client application. That’s a fact!

   

3. Configure Site Security
   

   Until SharePoint 2007, you had to go through the browser to configure the security for your site. It didn’t matter what your credentials were. You could be the SharePoint server admin, but still you had to resort through using the browser. Not anymore! You can configure security directly in SPD now. Creating new SharePoint groups, associating them to the appropriate permission levels and adding users to the groups is all built into the environment now.

   
   

4. Create Content Types and attach to Lists directly
   

   Having a good solid content type design in your SharePoint deployment is always a good idea. It is basically how you are telling SharePoint what types of content you will be generating in your environment. If you have not looked into content types, I advise that you read up on it. Using SPD 2010, you can now create your content types hierarchy without going to the browser. Adding site columns (or creating new ones) to content types is also pretty simple to do within SPD.

   

5. Create Site Assets for your site
   

   There is a new type of library now included in SharePoint 2010 called Site Assets. The objective of this library is to store the files that are used as resources for the site such as style sheets, JavaScript files, xml files and even images which need to be served up on site pages. You can create these resource files in site assets library directly through SPD. Since SPD supports intellisense for JavaScript, style sheets, and also xml, it is a much more conducive environment in which to author these files.

   

6. Use XSLT List View web parts to show dynamic views of your data
   

   In SharePoint 2007, we had List View web parts (LVWP) to show our list or library content in a page on the site. They worked fine, however, they were not very extensible. Meaning, if you wanted to manipulate their look and feel, you could only get as far as using the pre-built styles and layouts either through the browser or through SPD. On the other hand, we had the XSLT Data View web part (DVWP) which you could configure visually using only SharePoint Designer. That web part lets us manipulate any data points at a very granular level since all data was fetched as XML and manipulated using XSLT which is a very flexible way of transforming and presenting your data. The problem with this approach was that once the web part is deployed, it could not be easily changed or manipulated using the web browser. Enters XSLT List View web part! It gives us the best of both worlds. All lists and libraries are now deployed on pages as XSLT LVWP which can be easily configured using SPD and also extended further as needed using the browser.

   

7. Connect to Data Sources outside of SharePoint
   

   More often than not, you will need to display data on SharePoint pages that’s coming from outside of SharePoint. SPD provides an easy to use interface to make a connection to a data source that you have access to. It’s a fairly simple wizard driven process to connect to external data sources such as databases, xml files, server side scripts (including RSS feeds), and web services (also included in this release is the support for connecting to REST web services). The best part about this functionality is that you can link the data sources together and then show a unified view of the data. So for example, let’s say you’re in a retail business… your category information could be in a xml file, while your subcategories could be accessible through a vendor’s web service and then your actual products information is in your database. You can first create the connections to your data sources and then connect all of this information together to display a combined view of the data for your users. End users don’t need to know where the actual data is coming from as long as it all just works together ‘automagically’.

   

8. Create External Content Types using Business Connectivity Services
   

   SharePoint 2007 introduced a new functionality called Business Data Catalog. That functionality has now been renamed Business Connectivity Services. The idea behind this functionality is to expose Line of Business data from your back end services (such as People Soft, SAP, custom databases etc.) to business analysts so they can use them within SharePoint. Each piece of information (for example a table in a database that has your Customers information) can be exposed as an External Content Type (ECT) by an IT professional or a developer using SharePoint Designer. Then a business analyst can use SharePoint through the web browser to make an External List which uses this ECT. The result will be that they have a list now showing information straight from the Customers table in the database (following the example from earlier). When anyone (who has permission of course) manipulates the information in that External List, it will actually be written back to that table in the database.

   

9. Create Powerful Reusable Workflows
   

   SharePoint Designer 20007 came with a very versatile platform to make really powerful Workflows. These were rule based workflows and utilized the ‘Activities’ already deployed at the server level. Aside from all the good stuff that these workflows provide, there was one big problem… You could not copy these workflows from one list to another or one site to another site. That quickly became a big problem if you had invested hours or days in making the workflow and then found out you couldn’t replicate it anywhere else. With SharePoint Designer 2010, you can create reusable workflows! These workflows can then be attached to lists, libraries or even content types. Not only that, but you can even package your workflows as a .wsp (solution file) and extend it further using Visual Studio! In addition to the reusable workflows, you can also create workflows which are specific to a site so there is no need to attach to a list or library at all (called Site Workflows). Oh, did I mention that workflows can now be modeled in Visio 2010 and then exported to SharePoint Designer? There are so many improvements in SPD workflows that it will take a separate blog post to dig into it all.

   

10. Restrict SharePoint Designer usage as needed
    

    SharePoint Designer 2010 is a powerful application. The usage of this application can be controlled at the Web Application and at the Site Collection level. A Site Collection admin, for example, can decide if she wants her Site admins to be able to utilize SPD at all. Not just that, but various functions within SPD can also be restricted. An example of that is creation and management of Master Pages and Page Layouts. Another facet that can be restricted is customization of pages and detaching them from the site definition.

    

     

    As you can tell, this is a very exciting new release of SharePoint Designer and it will change the way we manage, customize and configure our SharePoint environments. Each of these 10 things I mentioned above (and more that I did not get a chance to mention), deserve their own separate blog posts. Over time, I will be digging deeper into each of these things to provide you more perspective of how you can best utilize the features to your advantage. For now, I would recommend checking out our free 2010 videos that highlight many of the features listed above and more.