• Article

Changes in SharePoint Designer 2010 (for IT pros)

 

Applies to: Office 2010

Topic Last Modified: 2012-04-05

Banner stating end of support date for Office 2010 with link to more info

IT Pros can learn about the new, changed, and deprecated features of Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2010 and how these changes can impact migration plans.

Note

Are you looking for help using new features in SharePoint Designer 2010? Visit Office.com to learn how to use new features (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkId=224715).

In this article:


  • What’s removed


  • Migration considerations

What’s removed

This section provides information about removed features in SharePoint Designer 2010.

Contributor Settings

In Office SharePoint Designer 2007, Contributor Settings was used to configure and enable Contributor mode, a limited access mode. Users who opened a site for editing in Office SharePoint Designer 2007 had access to different commands or features, depending on which Contributor group they were assigned to and which editing restrictions had been assigned to that Contributor group. Contributor Settings worked at the site level, and the settings could not be inherited by any subsites of a parent site. Contributor Settings was not a security feature, it was designed to be used in an environment where site managers were confident of the intentions of the users and was intended to help prevent accidental changes to a Web site.

Contributor Settings is removed in Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2010 because the feature was complicated, underused, and did not integrate well with the SharePoint Products and Technologies permission model, because users could bypass the restrictions imposed by the feature. The functionality is replaced by a mix of reliance on the SharePoint Products and Technologies permission model and the SharePoint Role Designer feature.

Database features

The database features in Microsoft FrontPage and Office SharePoint Designer 2007 do not apply to SharePoint Product and Technologies Web sites and are not supported in Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2010. The features that are removed in Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2010 include the following:

  • Database Interface Wizard   Creates a new database-driven Web site in Office SharePoint Designer 2007.

  • Database Results Wizard   Creates Web pages that contain the database results Web component, also known as a WebBot, in Office SharePoint Designer 2007. SharePoint Designer 2010 does not support the Database Results WebBot. When you view a Web page or if you use Design view in SharePoint Designer 2010 to open an existing database results page, the Database Results WebBot is rendered as an HTML comment.

  • Database tab of the Site settings dialog box   Manages database connection settings in Office SharePoint Designer 2007.

Layout tables

In Office FrontPage 2003 and Office SharePoint Designer 2007, you could create Web page layouts by using layout tables and cells. A layout table is the framework you create for a page layout. Layout cells are the regions within that framework that contain the content in a page, including text, images, Web parts, and other elements. Together, layout tables and cells represent horizontal and vertical regions that users can add to Web pages, which provide visual structure for your content.

CSS layout features have replaced the layout tables feature in Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2010, and the extensive HTML comments that layout tables rely on are not recognized. If you open a Web page that contains an existing layout table in SharePoint Designer 2010, the layout table functions correctly. However, you cannot use SharePoint Designer 2010 to insert a new layout table.

Microsoft Script Editor (MSE)

In Office SharePoint Designer 2007 and previous versions of Microsoft FrontPage, you could use the Microsoft Script Editor (MSE) to add text, edit HTML tags, and edit any Microsoft Visual Basic Scripting Edition (VBScript) code in a data access page. MSE also provided IntelliSense features for script creation and editing. You could also use the Script Editor to view your page as it would appear in a Web browser. Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2010 does not include Microsoft Script Editor.

Publish, backup, and restore remote Web site

SharePoint Designer 2010 is designed for users to work on — instead of designing and publishing — SharePoint Products and Technologies Web sites. In contrast, Microsoft FrontPage was designed as a server-agnostic Web site creation and management tool. Legacy features for publishing and connecting to remote Web sites and managing the transfer of Web sites and Web content are removed in SharePoint Designer 2010.

SharePoint Designer 2010 is not designed to take the place of server administration tasks such as backup or restore. Operations — such as backup, restore, content migration, and other management tasks that affect entire SharePoint Products and Technologies Web sites — should be completed by using the Central Administration Web page.

Back up a Web site

SharePoint Designer 2010 is designed to work with content on an existing SharePoint Products and Technologies Web site. To back up a Web site, an administrator for the SharePoint Products and Technologies Web site uses the Central Administration Web site for the collection.

Restore a Web site

SharePoint Designer 2010 is designed to work with content on an existing SharePoint Products and Technologies Web site. To restore a Web site, an administrator for the SharePoint Products and Technologies Web site uses the Central Administration Web site for the collection.

FTP

FrontPage provided a built-in FTP client for connecting to servers without Microsoft FrontPage server extensions. The built-in FTP client enabled users to open sites over FTP and then publish an entire Web site or manage individual files on the remote Web server. Because SharePoint Designer 2010 is designed for working with SharePoint Products and Technologies Web sites, and these servers already have the necessary underlying code installed, an FTP client is not required and is removed.

Import Web site wizard

SharePoint Designer 2010 is designed to work with content on an existing SharePoint Products and Technologies Web site. Therefore, the ability to import a Web site from another server or from a file location is removed.

Publish Web site

SharePoint Designer 2010 is designed to work with content on a SharePoint Products and Technologies Web site. Therefore, the ability to create, edit, or publish a disk-based Web site and work with remote Web sites is removed. Unlike SharePoint Designer 2010, Office SharePoint Designer 2007 did support disk-based Web sites. When you edited Web pages from a Web site folder, metadata such as your logon name was saved for each file edited and used to display the author information, such as Created by or Modified by, for files in the Office SharePoint Designer 2007 Web Site views and File Properties dialog box. By clearing the Manage the Web site using Office SharePoint Designer 2007 metadata files check box in the Site Settings dialog box, you could choose to remove the metadata from the Web site folder on your local computer. Because the ability to open and work with disk-based Web sites is removed, this privacy concern does not apply to SharePoint Designer 2010.

Web package

A Web package can contain Web pages, templates, Web components, themes, graphics, style sheets, and other elements. Web packages are CAB files (with .fwp file name extensions) that you use to import or export from a Web site. When working with a SharePoint Products and Technologies Web site, SharePoint Designer 2010 provides direct access to importing or exporting Web packages. SharePoint Designer 2010 does not import Web package files.

There are two alternative methods that we recommend to deploy packaged functionality when you are working with a SharePoint Products and Technologies Web site. The first method is that you can use a custom site template. Custom site templates are stored as an .stp file in the SharePoint database. Second, you can use the Windows SharePoint Services solution framework. You can use solutions to package and deploy custom features, site definitions, templates, Web parts, and assemblies. The Windows SharePoint Services solution framework lets you bundle all the components for extending Windows SharePoint Services in a solution file. A solution file is a cabinet format file but it has a .wsp extension. A solution is a deployable, reusable package that contains a set of features, site definitions, and assemblies that apply to sites, and that you can individually enable or disable. You can use the solution file to deploy the contents of a Web Part package. This includes assemblies, class resources, .dwp files, and other package components.

Views

Views in FrontPage and Office SharePoint Designer 2007 offered various ways to view the files and edit Web pages in your Web site. Each view offered its own advantages for performing Web site creation, editing, maintenance, and management tasks. SharePoint Designer 2010 includes changes to the Reports, Navigation, and Hyperlinks views.

Reports view

In Office SharePoint Designer 2007, Reports view enables you to run reports for information such as the number and kind of images on your page, broken or outdated hyperlinks, or pages that might be slow to load. In FrontPage and Office SharePoint Designer 2007, Reports view provides access to statistics that let you monitor all aspects of your Web site. You can examine detailed information about the performance of your Web site and also information about your visitors. You can also use the reports to find and fix many common problems, keep track of the development on your Web site, and continue to improve and tailor your Web site to enhance the user experience.

SharePoint Designer 2010 changes the way that you access reports and has removed those reports that are not useful in a SharePoint Products and Technologies Web site.

In FrontPage or Office SharePoint Designer 2007, the Navigation view provides an overhead look at the navigation structure of your Web site and shows the Web pages that are a part of the navigation structure of the Web site as a flowchart. The Navigation view and Navigation task pane do not work well with SharePoint Products and Technologies Web sites and have been replaced by new features such as site navigation and the quick launch bar.

Hyperlinks view provides a visual representation of all the hyperlinks related to a specific Web page in a Web site. When you select a Web page in the hyperlinks view, all the other Web pages in that Web site that contain hyperlinks that connect to the selected Web page are displayed, and a line connects the Web pages. Along with displaying these hyperlinks, the hyperlinks from the Web page to any resource — image, Web page, or other object — is displayed together with an indication of the link validity.

The Hyperlinks view is removed from SharePoint Designer 2010, because this approach to hyperlinks is not useful in a SharePoint Products and Technologies Web site. The error checking features in SharePoint Designer 2010 let you check for broken links, unused pages, cascading style sheets usage, and master page usage.

Migration considerations

When planning a migration to SharePoint Designer 2010, review what is new, changed, and removed for SharePoint Designer 2010.