Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2010

When getting in touch with SharePoint 2010 you might also use SharePoint Designer 2010. The toowill, just as it's 2007 predecessor, be available for free.

SPD 2010 has been through a complete face lift and will now provide you with much more information about the site you are editing. This post is only meant to give you a first glance of how everything looks in this new version. In the following days I will go into more detail about certain aspects.

The main screen now looks like this. Right from within SPD you can now change your site's title, description and see information like how much space it is using, the different SharePoint groups and their permissions and navigational info.

Site pages give you direct access to all pages in the site. Clicking on a page will give you more information about it like title, author, check-in status and so on.

Masterpages give you direct access to the master pages folder. No need to go to it yourself anymore. As you can see you can create blank master pages, checkin, checkout, import and export files.

'Lists' gives an overview of all the lists of the current site. You can create new lists, create a list from a spreadsheet, save the list as a template, ... .

'Workflows' gives you an overview of all the workflows in the current site. You can create new workflows, import/export them from/to Visio, ... and create a reusable workflow. I will check this in more detail in the following days but I think you can now create SPD workflows that can be attached to more than one list which was a big limitation of the previous version. In this view you can also connect the workflow to a list or to a content type.

'Content Types' gives an overview of all the content types in the current site. You can get more details about a content type, information about the columns, create a new content type and attach them to a list.

'Datasources' gives you an overview of all the datasources and of course you can create new ones as well. You can make different sorts of connections (SQL database, SOAP/REST webservice, ... ).

'Entities' gives you the opportunity to manage your external content types. This way you can make a connection with a datasource and show the data in a new type of list, the 'external list'.

I skip right to 'All Files' where you see the all to familiar SPD 2007 view with all the files, folders and sites in the site.

As said before, in the coming days I will provide more details and screenshot about each different aspect of the views shown in this post.