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SharePoint Designer (discontinued)

Score3 out of 10

67 Reviews and Ratings

What is SharePoint Designer (discontinued)?

Microsoft's SharePoint Designer was a tool for developing SharePoint applications that has been discontinued.

Categories & Use Cases

SharePoint Designer - Tool to customize SharePoint

Pros

  • Workflows
  • Editing master pages
  • Publishing features

Cons

  • Synchronization
  • Application's size
  • Application's speed

Most Important Features

  • Workflow
  • Master page
  • Publishing

Return on Investment

  • High set-up time
  • Complex tool

Alternatives Considered

Nintex Process Platform

Other Software Used

Nintex Process Platform, SonarQube

Decent product

Pros

  • SP2010 workflows are the easiest way to get a text from a lookup field.
  • Workflows are free.
  • Fairly easy to use, intuitive interface.
  • Branding and CSS styling on the master page.

Cons

  • Cross-site and cross-site collection lookups.
  • Get text from lookup fields in 2013 (or next release). It is cumbersome to need multiple workflows for one task.
  • No ability to edit DispForm.aspx, etc.

Return on Investment

  • Positive: Where we can use it, it saves the cost of a Nintex workflow.
  • Negative: Nothing really. It doesn't have all the features I would like, but what it has worked fine.

Alternatives Considered

Nintex Platform

Other Software Used

Microsoft 365 Business, Nintex Platform, Notepad++

Valuable tool for SharePoint customization

Pros

  • Customization of SharePoint.
  • Deployment of workflow solutions.

Cons

  • Tool itself needs improvement as it sometime crashes.
  • SPFX page modification.

Return on Investment

  • Business satisfaction in customizing things.
  • Cost-free when you have on-premise environment.

Alternatives Considered

PowerApps and Flow

Other Software Used

PowerApps, Microsoft Flow

SharePoint Designer Novice

Pros

  • Allows me to go directly to the file structure I want to examine.
  • Allows me to move files from one area within a site to another.
  • Good for editing the HTML code within a page.

Cons

  • Navigation between sub-sites and beyond the entry point is not seamless. I find it difficult to get to the root of a directory structure if I have not started there.
  • Would love to be able to do WYSIWYG in some form. I have only used it for a year but I have not found anything fancy to do.
  • I would like to be able to work in a development site and easily move to the production site.

Return on Investment

  • For my needs, I have not found SharePoint Designer useful for my day to day maintenance of SharePoint. It is useful for viewing all the objects that make up the SharePoint site.
  • It is not as intuitive in regard to setting up Workflows. I have yet to use it to set up workflows in SharePoint. Maybe if I needed more complex workflows, it would be beneficial.
  • I like to use SharePoint Designer for moving around files within SharePoint sites.

Other Software Used

Adobe Acrobat DC, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator CC

Review of MS SharePoint for Cloud Based Company

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use it to collaborate and share data with different depts. and with our user experience consultants. Everyone has a shared dept that we can go in and get the information we need. We like that it is cloud-based and can be accessed anywhere. We work remote half of the time so this helps us complete our tasks and jobs.

Pros

  • Collaborate
  • Access by Cloud

Cons

  • Sometimes can be cumbersome to sign in
  • Had had an issue during an update where we couldn't access SharePoint and had to involve our IT dept to help set up shared drive folders on my computer

Alternatives Considered

Dropbox

Other Software Used

Dropbox