designer

Understanding What’s New in SharePoint Designer 2010 7
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Easier management of SharePoint components The new Navigation pane,
which replaces the Folder List task pane in SharePoint Designer 2007, focuses on
SharePoint artifacts and not where the artifacts are stored. You can now manipulate
major SharePoint components—such as content types, site columns, and external
lists—and modify site and list permissions natively within SharePoint Designer.
Using SharePoint Designer to manipulate SharePoint components is now much
faster and more efficient than using a Web browser to complete similar tasks.
New tools to help users create better composites (solutions) Two areas of tool
improvement are:
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Workflows The challenge in implementing a new workflow is that the person
who creates the workflow is usually not the one who defines the requirements.
SharePoint 2010 addresses this challenge by allowing people to create
workflows in Visio 2010 and export them into SharePoint Designer 2010,
where business logic and additional rules are added. Workflows developed in
SharePoint Designer can be exported from one SharePoint site and imported
into another, as well as into Visual Studio 2010. This enables development and
testing of the SharePoint Designer custom workflow to take place in a trusted
environment before deployment to the production system. In the previous
version of SharePoint, this was available only with workflows created using
Visual Studio. More information on workflows can be found in Chapter 8,
“Understanding Workflows,” and Chapter 9, “Using Reusable Workflows and
Workflow Forms.”
Business Connectivity Services (BCS) Originally called the Business Data
Catalog, BCS is now available in the base product, Microsoft SharePoint
Foundation 2010. SharePoint Designer is the major tool for information workers
and business analysts to define how to access external systems and create
dashboards and composite applications based on data from the external systems.
The BCS is detailed in Chapter 7, “Using Business Connectivity Services.”
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Performance and stability improvements Until the release of Service Pack 2,
SharePoint Designer 2007 had major performance and stability issues. Some users
also complained about the code SharePoint Designer 2007 generated. Microsoft
has invested heavily in this area.
A number of SharePoint Designer 2007 features are removed from SharePoint Designer
2010. Many of these features are not relevant to SharePoint sites, and since SharePoint
Designer 2010 can be used only with SharePoint 2010 sites, they served no purpose. The
features removed include: