Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer - Office SharePoint Designer’s Features
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One of the features you’ll find in Office SharePoint Designer is Workflow Designer. You can use this feature to automate your business processes, such as developing a document approval system. Another function that Office SharePoint Designer contains is the ability to send out customized alerts to your colleagues. For example, if one of your fellow workers has updated or uploaded a document, you can have Office SharePoint Designer alert you of these changes.
If you have a knack for programming, Office SharePoint Designer supports Microsoft ASP.NET. You can use Office SharePoint Designer to develop applications based on the Microsoft SharePoint platform. If you used Microsoft Visual Studio 2005, you probably remember the insert and edit controls functions. Well, Office SharePoint Designer contains these same functions. Insert and edit functions still contain the powerful control property grid and activity menus.
Office SharePoint Designer not only comes equipped with design tools, it supports various browsers, including XHTML. If you’re concerned about the disabled being able to access your website, Office SharePoint Designer does comply with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and Section 508. Another feature you can use in Office SharePoint Designer is CSS (cascading style sheets). If you need to change the format or layout, you can use the ASP.NET master pages to perform this function.
Office SharePoint Designer also comes with role-based templates. Developers created role-based templates as a way to customize your needs and requirements within your company. The idea behind them is to help give you a better business perspective and make your company more productive, using an interface with which you and your colleagues can identify. As a result, you and your colleagues will be able to retrieve important information that revolves around processes and job functions. You can also incorporate role-based templates into existing systems. Visit Microsoft’s website for more information on this subject.
If you are an IT manager or site administrator you can set up access rights for your employees. Make use of the "Set up Contributor Settings" feature to set up control access for all of your employees. For example, you can enable certain colleagues to have editing rights while others just have viewing rights.
Office SharePoint Designer enables you to incorporate your business data. This application enables you to integrate your data, using external technologies, including web services, Microsoft SQL server databases, XML files, and enterprise systems. You can also use data from SharePoint lists and document libraries.
You can use forms and data views to create reporting and tracking applications. Use these functions to simply gather and collect data either from Office SharePoint’s document libraries or lists on the website. You can also gather and collect information from outside your website.
Take advantage of Office SharePoint Designer’s reports feature to manage your website. These reports will reveal crucial information, such as identifying broken links, both cascade style sheets and master page use, and unused pages. You can take advantage of Office SharePoint Designer’s site backup and restore features to do the following: transfer a website to another server that runs Windows SharePoint Services technology, or save your website to a single file so that you can protect your data.
Next: Application Templates and Master Pages >>
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