SharePoint Designer Overview

A SharePoint Workflows tutorial by Peter Kalmström

SharePoint Designer is a free tool that SharePoint admins can use for developing the SharePoint platform. If you want to create and customize SharePoint workflows, it is necessary to use SharePoint Designer.

A SharePoint site can be opened locally in SharePoint Designer, and when that is done you will have a good overview over the site, its content, permissions and workflows. You can make modifications or create a new workflow, and when you are finished the changes are published to the site.

SharePoint Designer is a useful tool for all SharePoint administrators, but as Microsoft has not created a 2016 version the tool will probably be discontinued in a few years. That is something you should be aware of if you decide to learn and use SharePoint Designer.

Today there is however no really good replacement for SharePoint Designer, so it is widely used and will have a prominent part in this SharePoint Workflows series.

In the two demos below, Peter Kalmström, CEO and Systems Designer of kalmstrom.com Business Solutions, gives an overview over SharePoint Designer.

In the first demo Peter gives background information and lists advantages and disadvantages with using SharePoint Designer.

In the second demo Peter goes through the SharePoint Designer user interface. He shows how to open a site and a library or list in SharePoint Designer and how to work with it on the summary page. Peter also describes how you can work with the site objects and how to preview the changes in a browser.

In the next article, we will see how to install SharePoint Designer.