The SharePoint Designer 2010 Training DVD-ROM containing 4+ hours of video tutorials was released for sale yesterday. This DVD contains demonstrations showing you exactly how you can build solutions on top of SharePoint 2010 using SharePoint Designer 2010… without using any code! Here are some of the topics you will learn by watching the videos on this DVD:

• Create Powerful List, Reusable and Site Workflows
• Create Sites and Site Components
• Use the XSLT Web Parts and Conditional Formatting to present your data
• Access Data from Databases and Web Services
• Create External Content Types to expose your Line of Business Data
• Create Page Layouts in Publishing Sites
• Working with Master Pages
• Create processes using InfoPath 2010 Forms, Visio 2010 Workflow Models and SPD 2010 Workflows
• Create Custom Actions on Lists
• and more…

To celebrate the release of this DVD, we are offering a $25 discount to the first 50 people who purchase the Single User license DVD. Once at the checkout page, enter the coupon code SPD2010DVD (please remember to click the Apply button to apply the discount to the price).

The complete list of all videos and purchase information are available on the site: http://www.sharepoint-videos.com/sharepoint-designer-2010-training-dvd/

Would you like to own a copy of our SharePoint 2007 or SharePoint Designer 2007 videos to watch offline? Well, this is the best week to make that happen. We are offering a 20% discount on the single user licenses of both of our DVDs. When going through checkout, simply apply the coupon code SPDVD to take 20% off the price. This coupon code is only valid till end of day on Feb 12th. Here are direct links to both of the DVDs:

SharePoint 2007 Site Admin and End User Training

SharePoint Designer 2007 Training

We have decided to auction off one copy each of our SharePoint DVDs to help raise funds for relief and development in Haiti. There is no set price (reserve) for the listings. The total amount of the raised funds will go directly to the American Red Cross’ efforts for Haiti. You will find the listings on eBay here:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=270522078930&ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=270522084967&ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT

Please help spread the word. Thanks.

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.