Back in 2008, Woody Windischman, Bryan Phillips and I (Asif Rehmani) teamed up to write a book on SharePoint Designer 2007. The main reasons we wrote that book are because we really believe in SharePoint Designer and felt that there was just not enough ‘good’ information out there in the market about how to use it effectively. In fact, even till this day if you go to Amazon.com and read the reviews for the product, you will see that the prevailing viewpoint of reviewers is the complaint of not having a good user manual for it. In my humble opinion, I think we did a pretty good job at documenting a lot of abilities of this product in our book. My only regret is that the book came out so late in the market (it was published in Jan 2009). I truly believe that if this book was available earlier, it could have saved lots of unnecessary pain to many people who went about using SPD in a not so effective manner.

With the upcoming release of SharePoint Designer 2010, we have teamed up once again to write another book. The title of the book is Beginning SharePoint Designer 2010 by Wrox publications and the target release date is middle of 2010 – right after the product gets released. Even though we are writing under the Beginning series, rest assured that there will be a LOT of detailed information on SPD in the book. SPD 2010’s interface and functionality is so different from SPD 2007 that this book is going to be almost a complete rewrite for us. The SPD 2007 book will continue to be needed by anyone who is still using SharePoint 2007 (Reason: SharePoint Designer 2010 is not compatible with SharePoint 2007). Each of us is a SharePoint MVP, but we have different areas that we focus on within SharePoint. We have divided the book chapters between us keeping our complementary skills in mind to provide the reader with the best viewpoint we can offer about each area of functionality. In addition to the explanations we will provide on each functional area within SPD, there will be plenty of examples in each chapter to walk you through step-by-step scenarios on how to create the actual solutions. We think that these examples will be truly indispensable for readers who prefer hands on experience with the product.

We have high hopes for this book and our goal is that this book will be indispensable to any SharePoint professional whether they play a role of a server administrator, site collection administrator, site administrator, designer, developer or IT professional. Our belief is that to truly take advantage of SharePoint 2010, you need to be proficient in SharePoint Designer 2010 and our book will serve as your guide in your SharePoint adventures to make you into a SharePoint rock star!

Chapter 15 from our book (Professional SharePoint Designer 2007) is now available for free on MSDN. Bryan Phillips wrote that chapter. Congrats Bryan!

Here is the location of that chapter:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd819165.aspx

The Professional SharePoint Designer 2007 book that I co-authored with Woody and Bryan has finally hit the shelves. I hope this book can help fill the knowledge gaps on this Awesome (but often misunderstood) product.

Following will be the Table of Contents for the SharePoint Designer book (currently due to come out by Dec 31, 2008).

Disclaimer: As with any pre-release book, changes to the TOC are possible.

Part I, “The Basics”

Provides an overview of SharePoint Designer, SharePoint technology, and their relationship to one another.

Chapter 1: Exploring SharePoint Designer

Chapter 2: SharePoint from the User’s Perspective

Chapter 3: SharePoint from the Administrator’s Perspective

Chapter 4: SharePoint from a SharePoint Designer’s Perspective

Part II, “Customizing the SharePoint Look and Feel”

Shows how to use SharePoint Designer to customize various aspects of your sites.

Chapter 5: The Anatomy of a SharePoint Page

Chapter 6: Using SharePoint’s CSS Editing Tools

Chapter 7: The Anatomy of a Theme

Chapter 8: Publishing Master Pages and Layouts

Part III, “Applications without Programming”

Shows how SharePoint Designer can create many powerful applications that in the past would have required considerable programming effort.

Chapter 9: Building Your Own Workflows

Chapter 10: Working with SharePoint Data

Chapter 11: Advanced Data Access: External Data and More

Chapter 12: Working with Forms

Part IV, “Programming on the Client Side”

Demonstrates some tools provided by SharePoint and SharePoint Designer to enable even more custom interactivity.

Chapter 13: The Content Editor Web Part

Chapter 14: The SharePoint Client-side Object Model

Part V, “Beyond SharePoint Designer”

Takes you far past the built-in capabilities of SharePoint Designer with extensions, add-ins, migration, and conversion tools.

Chapter 15: Creating Workflow Elements in Visual Studio

Chapter 16: Custom Web Parts

Chapter 17: SharePoint Designer Add-ins

Chapter 18: A Little Administration

Appendix A: A Brief History of SharePoint and SharePoint Designer

Let me first start by saying that SharePoint Designer (SPD) is not for everyone. I believe it does have its place with the Power Users, and Site Administrators within the organization, but if not used properly, it can severely damage your sites and potentially your whole Portal.

My reasons for liking it are the following features in SPD:

1. Creating Sites and Lists and Libraries within those sites
2. Being able to backup your sites or site collections. Also, you can restore your site at any location
3. Designing powerful Workflows for a list or library within a site
4. Using the Data View web part to create mashups of data from a variety of sources
5. Reporting on site usage
6. Working with the Web Content Management features of SharePoint (creation of Master Pages and Page Layouts based on Content Types)
7. “Prettying” your sites using Cascading Styles – using SPD makes it pretty easy to manage this process

And that’s not all… there’s even more stuff you can do with SPD.

Over the years, I have presented many conference sessions (at Microsoft’s SharePoint Conference, SharePoint Connections and SharePoint Advisor) on a variety of topics within SPD. So it just seemed natural to foray into writing more formally about the product and educate people on the intricacies of using SPD. With that said, I would like to officially announce at this time that I, in conjunction with a couple of co-authors, am writing the Professional SharePoint Designer book by Wrox publications. The release date is set to the end of this calendar year. Here is a snapshot from the book’s web page on Amazon:

Fellow MVP, my friend and an all around “Great Guy” Robert Bogue has published a new book titled The SharePoint Shepherd’s guide for End Users. This book is a 116 page step-by-step on how to use SharePoint. SharePoint has grown up to be a monster of a platform and it’s very easy to get lost in it. This guide will help you navigate your way around the core tasks within SharePoint with just enough visuals (screenshots) to keep you from getting lost.

You can order the book directly from the Lulu site