Using SharePoint Designer 2010

I have just downloaded and installed SharePoint Designer 2010, a powerful application that makes it easy to design and manage custom sites and pages with no coding experience required.  It’s a 250MB download and is easy to install using the wizard.

Once installed I opened my corporate Intranet and was presented with a dashboard that provided quick links to manage site information, permissions and sub sites as well as a navigation tree to manage site objects.

The interface to edit pages is familiar, one that reminds me of using Front Page; tabbed switching between pages and a choice of using Design View, Code View or Split View.  The Ribbon contains all the options you’d expect to format text, insert pictures or hyperlinks and modify the view.

If you’ve used earlier versions of SharePoint Designer you’ll notice several improvements in this release:

• Much cleaner user interface
• The Ribbon
• Save and delete templates
• Support for workflow templates
• Easier to manage site content structure
• Manage content types

SharePoint Designer 2010 is free and available to download here – be aware that SharePoint Designer 2010 will only connect to SharePoint 2010.