Published: March 30, 2009

Dear Valued Customer:

One frequent comment from you to us here at Microsoft is that a significant part of the capabilities of SharePoint Designer are seen as just an extension of what SharePoint already does. In addition, we hear more and more that you want to be able to create increasingly dynamic web sites on SharePoint.

In response to this feedback, we are implementing a number of changes to promote and facilitate even more customization efforts on top of our platform:

• Starting on April 1, 2009, we are making SharePoint Designer 2007 available as a free download.
• Customers with SharePoint Designer 2007 Software Assurance (SA) current as of April 1, 2009 will receive upgrade rights to Expression Web for the lifetime of their SA agreement.

We believe that these changes will help you enable more users in your organization to create customizations that increase the value of your investments in SharePoint products and technologies now and in the future. We are making SharePoint Designer even better in its next version, which will ship simultaneously with our next release of SharePoint. While the current version of Expression Web does not directly support SharePoint, we are also making significant investments to ensure that future versions of Expression Web become an excellent choice for page customization of SharePoint sites.

You can expect our future investments in this area to be focused on ensuring that each relevant role within your organization has the right tools to work on SharePoint while allowing different roles to collaborate. To this end, Expression Web and the full Expression Suite will empower professional designers with page customization capabilities on SharePoint, while SharePoint users can continue to use SharePoint Designer. Our goal is to continue helping customers just like you use SharePoint to deliver custom portal solutions, extranets, intranets, internet-facing sites, collaboration solutions, social networking sites, and internal applications on top of the extensive capabilities of SharePoint.

This is an exciting time for SharePoint and we at Microsoft are confident that you will be impressed by our continued commitment to providing you with the right tools to support the investments you have made and continue to make with us. Your account team or your Microsoft partner are there to assist you and can provide you with any additional information, which is also available at http://www.microsoft.com/spd.

On behalf of Microsoft, thank you for your continued support.

Sincerely,
The SharePoint Team
Microsoft Corporation