SharePoint Designer 2007 is Now FREE!

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