SharePoint Designer 2007 is Now FREE!

April 2, 2009 Leave a comment

I wanted to wait until after April 1st for obvious reasons to blog about about the chatter I was hearing, and sure enough, it was no joke. SharePoint Designer 2007 is now free.

This is both good and bad. Good – because everyone can save on licensing costs, and bad, because it extends a lot of power out to site owners and designers. A lot of damage can be caused to a site by using SharePoint Designer.

Based on that, Robert Bogue [SharePoint MVP], has a great post regarding SharePoint Designer governance, which can be found here: http://www.thorprojects.com/blog/archive/2008/02/12/sharepoint-designer-and-governance.aspx

And with governance in mind, you may want to think about locking down your installation to control the usage of SharePoint Designer. Here is a great post from the SharePoint Designer Team Blog that talks about how to lock down SharePoint Designer within your SharePoint environment: http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepointdesigner/archive/2008/11/25/locking-down-sharepoint-designer.aspx

Updated 4.4.09 – Woody Windischman, who quite literally wrote the book on Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer, put together a great post surrounding the news of this tool now being free. I encourage everyone to read it here: http://woodywindy.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!773832677F575173!633.entry

And finally, the link to download SharePoint Designer 2007, for free: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=baa3ad86-bfc1-4bd4-9812-d9e710d44f42

Technorati Tags: SharePoint,SharePoint Designer,SharePoint Designer 2007,WSS,MOSS,Windows SharePoint Services,Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007,Governance

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About Geoff Varosky
Geoff Varosky is a Senior Architect for BlueMetal Architects, based out of Watertown, MA. He has been architecting and developing web based applications his entire career, and has been working with SharePoint for the past 13 years. Geoff is an active member of the SharePoint community, Co-Founder and Co-Organizer of the Boston Area SharePoint Users Group, co-founder for the Boston Office 365 Users Group, co-organizer for SharePoint Saturday Boston and speaks regularly at SharePoint events and user groups.