SharePoint Designer 2007 and 2010 Cohabitating: Updated Again…

Facts, rumors and stuff.  Here are the facts:

  • You cannot use SharePoint Designer (SPD) 2010 to manage SharePoint 2007 sites.
  • You can’t use SharePoint Designer (SPD) 2007 to access SharePoint 2010 sites. 

So, if you have to maintain both 2007 and 2010 SharePoint environments you need to have both versions of SPD installed somewhere.  Most administrators would probably prefer that they be readily available on the same machine.  

Reportedly, you could only have both versions installed if they were the same bit-level versions – specifically 32-bit since there isn’t a 64-bit version of SPD 2007.

Something I wasn’t aware of until now was that it wasn’t just SPD that in conflict – it’s any office client.  If you intend to install both versions of SPD on the same OS, ALL of your Office client apps will need to be 32-bit (Paul Stork).

-> Something else new that I learned was that you CAN have both versions of SPD installed with 64-bit SPD (all Office) 2010 and 32-bit SPD 2007 as long as SPD 2007 is installed after the 64-bit 2010 clients have been installed (Clayton Cobb). 
(Updated 4/16) – While this is technically possible right now, it is an officially unsupported scenario (see the last statement in the second long paragraph of the article): 
http://blogs.technet.com/office2010/archive/2010/02/23/understanding-64-bit-office.aspx
Thanks to Woody for pointing this out

This information is based on running pre-RTM versions of the 2010 Office clients and therefore should be tested again with the RTM bits when they are available.

It should also be noted that some folks have the opinion that the 2007 clients should not be installed side-by-side with the 2010 clients. (Mike Walsh)  Thankfully with the ease of being able to run Windows XP Mode on Windows 7, one scenario for circumventing this is to install the latest and greatest 2010 bits on the host OS, and then SPD 2007 on the Windows XP mode.  Hopefully there is a scenario that fits your individual or organization’s needs.    

NOTE: Information in this post is based on a TechNet forum thread with the names of the folks providing information tagged with the information they provided…  Thanks guys!

Post:
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepoint2010general/thread/75697656-6578-48e1-93be-4e335629554f

One comment

  1. They sure are making it easy on developers… It’s a nice feature to run apps under XP Mode, but they are slow at best. Unfortunately, that’s the only real option you/I have.

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