Presenter: Asif Rehmani – SharePoint Server MVP

“My IT department says we are not allowed to use SharePoint Designer.” This phrase is fairly common when the topic of SharePoint Designer comes up in a training, conference setting or a consulting engagement. IT departments have concerns around deploying SharePoint Designer to end users.

This session provides real world use cases and guidance that covers when it is safe to let your site administrators use SharePoint Designer 2010 (and also when it’s not safe). In addition, we will discuss the different level of privileges that should be granted to different groups of people in your organization.

Audience: IT Professionals, SharePoint Site Owners, Developers, Power Users

For more SharePoint Designer 2010 information, check out our SharePoint Designer 2010 video tutorials.

To get Full Screen video: Right click on video and select Zoom -> Full Screen

Webinar originally conducted on 5/18/2011.
Presenter: Andrew Connell (http://www.criticalpathtraining.com)

Audience: Developers, IT Professionals, Site and Site Collection Administrators

Pre-requisites: Fundamental knowledge of SharePoint Designer 2010 workflows is assumed.

Generally the best story for creating custom workflows in SharePoint 2010 is to stick with the declarative and most productive option: use SharePoint Designer 2010. However there are situations when SharePoint Designer cannot achieve some business requirements. One common example is when you need to implement some sort of a loop. In this session, you’ll see what’s involved in creating a custom activity (action) in Visual Studio 2010 and deploy it to SharePoint so it can be used in SharePoint Designer based workflows.

Forms and Workflows are important for automating business processes. Companies usually rely on programmers to create the forms and workflows using code. Not anymore! With InfoPath 2010 and SharePoint Designer 2010, you can create powerful data driven form composite solutions on your SharePoint sites. InfoPath gives you the ability to pull data from databases and lists, and create forms with data validation and conditional formatting. SharePoint Designer’s workflows let you then design powerful multi-step workflows centered around the form collected data, building upon the out-of-the-box reusable workflows and even import workflow designs from Visio! In this presentation, you will see how these tools come together to design workflows and route forms across your organization for task assignment and approval.

The last 20 minutes of the webinar consists of Q&A by attendees.

This webinar starts with an explanation of why you would want to use SharePoint Designer 2010 instead of the browser to create your site components. Then the presentation digs deeper into showing how you can create powerful workflows. Subsequently, the last thing demonstrated is how easy it is to fetch data from a database and show on a SharePoint page. Along the way, there were many good questions that attendees asked and the attempt was made to answer as many as possible in the allotted time.