Introducing SharePoint Designer

SharePoint Designer 2013 is a client program that installs on your local computer. It is also tightly integrated with SharePoint. As such, it can be launched directly from your machine using Windows Start menu and various places in SharePoint, such as the Edit button on the Page menu.

There are a number of places where you can open SharePoint Designer 2013, for example, when customizing lists, views, workflows, and master pages. If you haven’t installed SharePoint Designer 2013 yet, the first time you launch it from SharePoint, you’re prompted to download and install it from the web. The next time you open SharePoint Designer 2013, it opens immediately. It’s also available in the Windows Start menu.

When you open SharePoint Designer 2013 from the Windows Start menu, the first thing you see is the File tab. You have the option to customize an existing site or create a new site on this screen.

To customize an existing site, you can browse to an existing site, customize your My Site, or select one of the recent sites you’ve opened in SharePoint Designer 2013.

To create a new site, you can use a blank template, choose from a list of templates, or choose from one of the featured templates. From here, just specify the server and a site name and create the site. Your site is created and then opens in SharePoint Designer 2013.

If you open SharePoint Designer 2013 from SharePoint, you won’t see this screen. Instead, you’ll see your site open in the SharePoint Designer 2013 interface.

Lists and libraries are a common data source you’ll use on your site. They’re unique compared to the other data sources in that they’re already part of SharePoint and use the same database as SharePoint. You don’t need to perform any additional steps to create a connection to these data sources – just add them using the Lists and Libraries gallery in SharePoint Designer 2013 or add them in the browser. Once you create a list or library, you can customize its associated columns, content types, and other schema attributes.

Business Connectivity Services (BCS) is a SharePoint-based framework that provides standardized interfaces to existing business data and processes. With BCS, you can connect external business data sources—SQL Server, SAP and Siebel, web services, and custom applications—to SharePoint sites and Office applications.

In SharePoint Designer 2013, you connect to the external data by creating external content types. External content types represent the data in the external data source by storing the details of the connection, objects used in the business application, methods to create, read, update, or delete, and actions users can take on the objects themselves.

The external content type is stored in the Business Data Catalog. Once you create the external content type, you and others in your organization can easily create SharePoint lists, views, forms, workflows, and even Office client integration based on it. The external data becomes part of SharePoint like any other component, which allows you to create completely customized user interfaces to these external data sources.

Adding a database as a data source allows you to integrate data from another database to your site. You can connect to Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, and any database that supports the OLE DB or ODBC protocols. You just need to know the name of the server where the database is located, the data provider, and the type of authentication to use. Once you add and configure the database as a data source, you create views and forms that allow your users to read and write data back to the data source without ever leaving the SharePoint site.

Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) is a protocol for exchanging XML-based messages, making it possible to connect to various data sources using an XML web service. In SharePoint Designer 2013, you can use this to connect to a data source on another site in your organization or a site on the Internet regardless of its technology, programming language, or platform. You could use an XML web service to display a currency converter, stock quote, calculator, or weather service on your site.

Representational state transfer (REST) is an architectural style of networked software that takes advantage of the technologies and protocols of the web, not just a method for building web services. You can use this type to get data from a site by reading a designated server-side script that describes the content. Similar to SOAP, you could use this in SharePoint Designer 2013 to connect to a data source on another site to display, for example, a currency converter, stock quote, calculator, or weather service. This type of data connection is simpler than SOAP to implement but is restricted to HTTP.

If your organization stores data in XML files, you can connect to these files as a data source in SharePoint Designer 2013. To connect to the XML files as a data source, you can create them directly in SharePoint Designer 2013, import them from a location on your computer or network, or connect to them on an external location.

Views allow you to see data in different ways. Whether you’re looking at a list or library or an external data source, you can use views to show the information that is relevant to you and your users. In SharePoint Designer 2013, every view you create is a Data View that displays in XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformation), and it leverages Microsoft ASP.NET technology. In a view, you can show and hide fields, sort, filter, calculate, apply conditional formatting, and more. There are several View Styles that you can choose from as well to quickly get started. Ultimately, you can create and customize any view to fit your data model, your users, and your business.

To collect information from users, you create forms. With highly customized web-based forms, users can easily write data back to a data source. Similar to views, you can customize the appearance of fields based on the state of the data, user role, and more. Forms can be used to display data, edit data, and create data, and you can design forms using SharePoint Designer 2013’s built-in forms editor (for .aspx files) or Microsoft InfoPath (for .xsn files). Forms can be created and customized for specific data sources, such as a task list, and they can be used to collect user information in a workflow, as explained later.

Using the Custom Action builder in SharePoint Designer 2013, you can create custom actions, such as links, icons, and scripts to the SharePoint Ribbon, toolbar, and list item menus. Anytime you add new functionality to the site, you can make it easier for your users to discover it and use it by exposing that functionality in a SharePoint menu. You can also use custom actions to encourage users to perform certain tasks on a given object, such as starting a workflow on a list.

web Parts are modular units of information—a self-contained data or feature—that is added to a SharePoint page. The views and forms described earlier are stored in web Parts, but in addition to these, you can add web Parts that perform a number of functions and ways to interact with data. Users can further customize web Parts in the browser if you add them to a web Part zone in SharePoint Designer 2013. web Parts and web Part Pages are a powerful and effective way to customize the web interface for your users in SharePoint.

For external data sources that use external content types, you can surface that information in client applications like Microsoft Outlook and SharePoint Workspaces. You can create an interface for users to read, write, and delete the external business data just as if it were part of the application. You do this with client forms, regions, and task panes. Your users, as a result, get to work with their business data on the sites and Office applications they know best and are already using.

Navigation plays a key part in the interfaces you create for your users, and it’s an area that you manage throughout SharePoint, not just SharePoint Designer 2013. For example, you might customize navigation links within a Data View or form, a web Part, a workflow, or at the site level, such as the top link bar or Quick Launch. You want to make sure that the site and all of its parts have a well-planned navigation model that your users can follow.

An event is what starts or initiates a workflow. A change to a data source—such as a new item created or an item changed—is one type of event. Another type of event is one activated by a user, a workflow participant. Workflows that start when a data source changes are typically part of an application focused workflow to automate a business process, such as copying files based on the state of data. Workflows that can be started by users are typically part of a human collaborative workflow, such as content approval. Workflows can be set up to recognize both types of events and can even be based on a combination of the two.

Conditions determine when a workflow runs or performs an activity. Since workflows are associated with a data source, the condition specifies the change to the data source that must take place for the workflow to happen. Conditions typically start with the clause “If field equals value.” One condition can be used with multiple actions, and multiple conditions can be used with one action. Rules combine conditions with one or more actions: If all clauses in the condition are true, the associated action takes place.

Actions are the most basic units of work in a workflow. When you design a workflow, you identify the necessary sequence of actions, and then you assemble that sequence of actions in the Workflow Designer. You can set them up so that they occur one after the other (serial actions) or both at the same time (parallel actions). The workflow can contain any number of actions, performed by the workflow itself or the participants in the workflow. SharePoint Designer 2013 includes a rich set of ready-made, reusable actions. Using these actions, your workflows can, for example, send emails, check items in or out of lists, do calculations, and much more.

Of these actions, there is a special set of Task Actions, like the Start Approval Process and Start Feedback Process, that contain a separate workflow editor specifically designed for human task processes in an organization. With these actions, you can create and customize sophisticated workflows that can manage almost any business process.

Workflows are comprised of one or more steps and substeps. Steps allow you to group conditions and actions so that one set of rules can be evaluated and performed before a second set. Each step may contain any number of conditions and actions. Your workflow can be designed as a sequence of actions in a step or a substep. The rules in one step are processed to conclusion before going on to the next step, so you want to group in the same step any rules necessary to effect the specific action or actions that you want. Steps can also be used as a way to organize your workflow, especially if it has numerous actions and very few conditions.

Workflows often contain forms that allow you to collect information from workflow participants at predefined times in the workflow. They also allow participants to interact with the tasks associated with a workflow. In a workflow, you can design initiation forms to gather information from users when they start the workflow, association forms to associate the workflow with a list or content type, forms for custom tasks associated with the Tasks list. When designing forms, you can use the native ASP.NET-based forms (.aspx pages) in SharePoint Designer 2013 or custom forms (.xsn pages) designed with Microsoft InfoPath 2010. InfoPath offers much more in customization and branding for your workflow forms.

A variable is a data storage location or cache inside a workflow. Using variables, you can store different types of data in a workflow and at a later point, reference that data using workflow lookups. There are many types of variables you can use in a workflow. You can use, for example, variables generated by initiation form parameters and local variables, which hold data associated with the current workflow. In a local variable, you can use numerous variable data types, including Boolean, Date/Time, List Item ID, Number, and String. After you create a variable and set it to a value, you can reference that variable in a condition or action later in the workflow.