New features in SharePoint Designer 2010

New features in SharePoint Designer 2010

Source: Step By Step SharePoint Designer 2010 by Penelope Coventry

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1. User interface (UI): The SharePoint Designer user interface (UI) is redesigned and uses the Office Fluent UI, which was designed to make it easier for users to use and find features within a product. It incorporates the ribbon and Backstage view, which can be accessed from the File tab.

2. Easier management of SharePoint components: The new Navigation pane, which replaces the Folder List task pane in SharePoint Designer 2007, focuses on SharePoint artifacts and not where the artifacts are stored. You can now manipulate major SharePoint components—such as content types, site columns, and external lists—and modify site and list permissions natively within SharePoint Designer. Using SharePoint Designer to manipulate SharePoint components is now much faster and more efficient than using a Web browser to complete similar tasks.

3. New tools to help users create better composites (solutions): Two areas of tool improvement are-

i.       Workflows: The challenge in implementing a new workflow is that the person who creates the workflow is usually not the one who defines the requirements. SharePoint 2010 addresses this challenge by allowing people to create workflows in Visio 2010 and export them into SharePoint Designer 2010, where business logic and additional rules are added. Workflows developed in SharePoint Designer can be exported from one SharePoint site and imported into another, as well as into Visual Studio 2010. This enables development and testing of the SharePoint Designer custom workflow to take place in a trusted environment before deployment to the production system. In the previous version of SharePoint, this was available only with workflows created using Visual Studio.

ii.       Business Connectivity Services (BCS): Originally called the Business Data Catalog, BCS is now available in the base product, Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010. SharePoint Designer is the major tool for information workers and business analysts to define how to access external systems and create dashboards and composite applications based on data from the external systems.

4. Performance and stability improvements: Until the release of Service Pack 2, SharePoint Designer 2007 had major performance and stability issues. Some users also complained about the code SharePoint Designer 2007 generated. Microsoft has invested heavily in this area.