Professional Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007

Most folks who know me know that I have a love-hate relationship with SharePoint Designer. (Some say I love to hate SharePoint Designer.) I’ve written about my feelings on a few occasions. In truth it’s not that I hate SPD — I actually love it. I just hate when it’s used for evil. Of course, my definition of evil may be different than yours. I tend to think from the perspective of infrastructure here in terms of the solutions I can’t deploy, I can’t migrate, and I can’t upgrade.

So when my buddy Woody started working on a new book about SharePoint Designer, I wasn’t exactly positive. However, knowing Woody, I knew that he’d cover both the good — and the bad. I’m happy to say that he’s done that. Along the way, he picked up two other MVPs to help. Asif and Bryan.

One of the real challenges, from my perspective, with SharePoint designer is that the demos you see, the web casts, etc., are all the same features (HTML editing, workflow, and Data Views) so you can’t really see what the tool can do. The examples and articles are always fairly trivial. They don’t seem to punch through to the hard issues that you face when using SharePoint Designer to design a site and to build solutions for users. However, I’m happy to say that the book appears to do that.

If you’re trying to figure out how SharePoint Designer can help you design your SharePoint site, or build sites that are truly useful for your users, I’d recommend it.