Office SharePoint Designer 2007 is a new product based on Microsoft Office FrontPage 2003 technologies. The product name reflects the emphasis on creating and customizing Microsoft SharePoint Web sites and building workflow-enabled applications on SharePoint technologies. As part of SharePoint Products and Technologies, Office SharePoint Designer 2007 gives you the powerful tools you need to:

• Deliver attractive and compelling pages.
• Incorporate data from a wide variety of sources into interactive Web pages.
• Build time-efficient applications and reporting tools on SharePoint Products and Technologies using intuitive menus, task panes, and wizards — all in an IT-managed environment.

Office SharePoint Designer 2007 is used in a wide range of industries for a variety of functions and workflow-enabled applications, which include:

• Reporting applications such as sales reports and inventory reports.
• Tracking applications such as asset tracking, equipment reservation, and performance measurement.
• Line-of-business tasks such as customer relationship management (CRM), expense reporting, and purchase order approval.
• Automation of business processes.

Office SharePoint Designer 2007 builds on FrontPage 2003 technologies to provide a new level of support for creating and customizing next-generation SharePoint Web sites. Office SharePoint Designer 2007 has deep editing support for the technologies underlying Windows SharePoint Services such as ASP.NET 2.0, cascading style sheets, and Microsoft Windows Workflow Foundation.

Office SharePoint Designer 2007, based on FrontPage 2003 technologies, puts the emphasis on creating and customizing SharePoint Web sites. Expression Web is a new product for creating standards-based Web sites. The two products share common technologies including a high-fidelity design surface with deep support for cascading style sheets and ASP.NET.

Office SharePoint Designer 2007 is designed for enterprise IT professionals and line-of-business solution creators aiming at developing and optimizing collaboration in teams under the management and supervision of IT and site administrators. Although experienced users will appreciate the extensive functions of Office SharePoint Designer 2007, no technical background is required to use the software. Convenient task panes and menus help you avoid writing markup or server code at any time when building applications and developing attractive and compelling SharePoint pages.

Office SharePoint Designer 2007 can be used as the foundation tool for customizing SharePoint sites, ranging from developing attractive and compelling sites, to information tracking and reporting, to building solutions and workflows:

• An engineering manager can track issues (such as software bugs) that arise during new product development using Workflow Designer. Automatic e-mail messages to the product team are issued after the bugs are resolved, thanks to custom workflows.
• A marketing manager can track the budget spent using live data from the invoicing database with a data view.
• A marketing business analyst can build and customize a SharePoint site to optimize the collaboration among various project stakeholders during the development of videotaped customer case studies to reduce overrun costs and speed up development.

See the system requirements for Office SharePoint Designer 2007.

Some features of Office SharePoint Designer 2007 require the Microsoft .NET Framework version 2.0 and Windows Workflow Foundation.

Yes, Office SharePoint Designer 2007 has excellent support for creating and editing XHTML pages and for using cascading style sheets to control the format and layout of pages.

XML is a condensed form of SGML, which developers can use to create customized tags that offer flexibility in organizing and presenting information. XML makes it easier to transition content from internal systems onto the Web using Office SharePoint Designer 2007. With Office SharePoint Designer 2007, you can define how XML documents that follow customer-defined schema are formatted on a Web page by authoring Extensible Stylesheet Language for Transformations (XSLT) directly within the Office SharePoint Designer 2007 editor.

Yes. You can use Office SharePoint Designer 2007 to open, modify, and enhance Web pages created in any version of FrontPage.

Yes. Office SharePoint Designer 2007 has excellent support for creating Web pages based on Web standards such as XHTML and cascading style sheets, and includes built-in compatibility checkers for these standards. Web sites created with Office SharePoint Designer 2007 are compatible with any browser that supports these standards.

By using Contributor Settings, site administrators and IT managers can control exactly how Office SharePoint Designer 2007 is used, to help ensure that information workers have an IT-managed and IT-compliant experience.

Office SharePoint Designer 2007 supports the WCAG and Section 508 (29 U.S.C. 794d) standards for accessibility, and includes built-in accessibility checkers for verifying Web sites against these requirements.

The purpose of Windows SharePoint Services application templates is increase customer productivity by providing prebuilt, fully functional, and extensible application templates that map business processes to SharePoint functionality across horizontal roles and vertical industries. All applications are fully customizable and extensible using Office SharePoint Designer 2007. For example, the application templates make extensive use of cascading style sheets for formatting and layout, as well as using custom workflows to model business processes.

Yes. Office SharePoint Designer 2007 and Visual Studio 2005 can be used together effectively to build ASP.NET 2.0 and SharePoint Web sites. Office SharePoint Designer 2007 has excellent support for creating and editing ASP.NET pages, and it provides the same level of support as Visual Studio 2005 for ASP.NET control hosting, property editing, toolbox, and Microsoft IntelliSense technology in Code View.

Office SharePoint Designer 2007 makes it easy to insert and preview images and Flash animations such as those created by Adobe Photoshop and Macromedia Flash.

Windows SharePoint Services is the engine for creating Web sites that help with information sharing and document collaboration, increasing individual and team productivity. It is a key piece of the information worker infrastructure delivered in Microsoft Windows Server 2003. It also provides additional team services and sites to the Microsoft Office system and other desktop applications, as well as serving as a platform for application development. SharePoint sites take file storage to a new level, from saving files to sharing information, which helps team members to work together on documents, tasks, contacts, events, and other information. SharePoint sites also help team and site managers easily manage site content and activity. In addition, the environment is designed for easy and flexible deployment, administration, and application development. Learn more about Windows SharePoint Services.

Yes. Office SharePoint Designer 2007 can be used with Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 Web sites, including those customized with FrontPage 2003. You won’t be able to use features that require Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, such as workflow and aggregate data views.

Office SharePoint Designer 2007 works with the same types of Web sites as FrontPage 2003. These include Web sites built on Windows SharePoint Services, disk-based Web sites, and Web sites built on FrontPage Server Extensions. Office SharePoint Designer 2007 can also open and edit Web sites directly with File Transfer Protocol (FTP) and Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV).

Office SharePoint Designer 2007 supports site backup and restore for SharePoint Web sites. This level of functionality is comparable to the support in FrontPage 2003, but with enhancements for next-generation SharePoint sites.

Office SharePoint Designer 2007 has support for publishing Web sites to a variety of Web servers using a variety of publishing protocols. Office SharePoint Designer 2007 can publish through the HTTP protocol to Web servers running FrontPage Server Extensions or Windows SharePoint Services, and publish through FTP, WebDAV, or the file system to any Web server supporting those protocols. Web pages that depend on SharePoint or ASP.NET will not work on other servers. Also, data stored in SharePoint lists is not copied as part of normal publishing functionality; that requires using the backup/restore feature, which works only with servers running Windows SharePoint Services.

Yes. Workflows created with the Workflow Designer are based on Windows Workflow Foundation, which is included in Windows SharePoint Services. These workflows are based on XOML — the XML markup language of Windows Workflow Foundation. The Workflow Designer generates XOML, which is automatically verified and deployed to the servers running Windows SharePoint Services when you create a workflow.

Office SharePoint Designer 2007 does not support writing or uploading server-side code to SharePoint sites. Office SharePoint Designer 2007 does support ASP.NET 2.0 codeless features such as connecting controls to data sources without writing code.

Find more information about Office SharePoint Designer 2007.