Limiting SharePoint Designer Access in SharePoint 2010

With all of the new and improved features in SharePoint 2010, one which we cannot overlook, is how access for SharePoint Designer is handled. After SharePoint Designer 2007 went from a paid program to a freely available download, there was a lot of buzz around the community and the blogosphere about governance related to SharePoint Designer 2010. Woody Windischman, who "wrote the book” on SharePoint Designer, has some great information on this over at this blog, The Sanity Point. His article around governance can be found here: http://www.thesanitypoint.com/archive/2009/04/03/on-babies-bathwater-and-sharepoint-designer.aspx

Robert Bogue [SharePoint MVP], also had a good post on the topic, which can be found here: http://www.thorprojects.com/blog/archive/2008/02/12/sharepoint-designer-and-governance.aspx

With SharePoint 2010, there are no obscure methods or actions required to limit SharePoint Designer access, they’ve moved it into the Site Collection Administration!

To view/modify these settings, go up to your site collection level, and look under the Site Collection Administration custom action group on the Site Settings page, and click on the SharePoint Designer Settings link towards the bottom.

From here, you can enable or disable SharePoint designer access to the entire site collection. And you can even go as far as enabled detaching pages from the site definition (unghosting pages), enable or disabling access to modify master and layout pages, and the ability to manage the site hierarchy.

A short but sweet post, but just another one of the new great features available in SharePoint 2010 (as of Beta 2).