Designing sharepoint pages - what can I use?

Question

I am in the process of downloading and installing the requisite sharepoint 2007 components, using the Bamboo utility to setup the software on Vista, on my Vista Home Premium machine. I am wondering, do I need Sharepoint Designer 2k7 to design in a WYSIWYG fashion or can I use Sharepoint Tools for Visual Studio 2008?

What are my options?

I can't find an article outlining my options.

Thanks

Answer 1

No, you need the Sharepoint Designer if you are looking trying to do some WYSIWYG editing, or you can edit / create pages by hand. In fact, early versions (earlier than 2007) there was not designer or product designed specifically for Sharepoint and the only tool available to do WYSIWYG was FrontPage :P

More info: http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepointdesigner/

HTH

Answer 2

Different tools.

Sharepoint Designer (SPD) is used for built in workflows, modifing existing pages, and a bunch of behind the scenes and admin type duties. It is billed as a end-user type tool but is too complex for that. This is the

Sharepoint Tools for Visual Studio is to help you create new items, create new workflow activies or complete workflows. Far above the end user and depending on how you want to go you can create stuff in visual studio and then use it using SPD.

Infopath used to create forms which are stored in sharepoint, end user level tool. Once you have a form stored in sharepoint you can use SPD to create a workflow based on the out of box workflow activities or you can use visual studio to create a more complex workflow which. If you have the enterprise edition of MOSS or the Forms server you can display these forms are HTML instead of requiring users to have Infopath installed on their local computers.

So if you are building a development/learning machine install all of them.

Answer 3

InfoPath (part of MS Office) is a nice tool for designing data-aware forms for SharePoint.

SharePoint Designer does seem the way to go for general design tasks, though.

Answer 4

You can open a moss site is VS 2008 but you'll get a whack of errors visually, believe to do with content regions, you can still edit page source just the same.

With that said you'll want sharepoint designer if you deal with it often as it has other features which come in handy.