{"id":369,"date":"2012-03-20T10:53:20","date_gmt":"2012-03-20T16:53:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.idubbs.com\/blog\/2012\/office-365-as-a-spd-learning-platform\/"},"modified":"2012-03-20T10:53:20","modified_gmt":"2012-03-20T16:53:20","slug":"office-365-as-a-spd-learning-platform","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.idubbs.com\/blog\/2012\/office-365-as-a-spd-learning-platform\/","title":{"rendered":"Office 365 as a SPD Learning Platform"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>SPD = SharePoint Designer, currently in the 2010 version. <\/p>\n<p>In my <a href=\"http:\/\/www.idubbs.com\/blog\/2012\/office-365-as-a-sharepoint-learning-platform\/\" target=\"_blank\">previous post<\/a> about using Office 365 as a learning platform for SharePoint, I briefly mentioned SharePoint Designer.&#160; But, we could have spent a lot more time talking about it than that \u2013 hence this follow-up post.&#160; <\/p>\n<p>In the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.idubbs.com\/blog\/2012\/office-365-as-a-sharepoint-learning-platform\/\" target=\"_blank\">previous post<\/a>, I mention using Office 365 because its very inexpensive and easy to spin up for any user, giving you the ability to learn and try things you might not be able to in your production environment.&#160; Well, is even more true with SharePoint Designer.&#160; <\/p>\n<p>Creating new sub site, new lists, tweaking list columns and playing with views are all things you can do in your SharePoint environment and they are *mostly* non-impacting on your production environment &#8211; if you play with them the right way and don\u2019t affect your users.&#160; SharePoint Designer has a little higher risk level, can be a little more invasive\/impacting on uses, and some environments have it disabled &#8211; so you\u2019re not even able to use SPD in your current sites.&#160; <\/p>\n<p>Enter Office 365 and SharePoint Online.&#160; Now you not only have a great way to use and ramp up on out of the box browser-based capabilities, but you have a fully-functioning site that SharePoint Designer can plug into \u2013 without risking your production environment and content.&#160; You can now build and demo functionality that you can show your colleagues, bosses and IT\/SharePoint team to demonstrate the value that can be had with SPD created solutions.&#160; <\/p>\n<p>Top things to check out with SharePoint Designer using your new Office 365 account (in my humble opinion):<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Conditional Formatting \u2013 If this value is lower than X, then display this field with red text, show this funky icon, etc\u2026<\/li>\n<li>Data Views \u2013 Format list views in ways you can\u2019t with the browser-based configuration capabilities.&#160; <\/li>\n<li>Condition\/Action Driven Workflow \u2013 Create basic and more complicated workflows that aren\u2019t available in the pre-created workflows.<\/li>\n<li>Adding and Editing forms \u2013 Very quickly add or edit NewItem and EditItem forms.&#160; For example remove fields or reformat the form to make it more intuitive for users.&#160; <\/li>\n<li>\u2018Designery\u2019 stuff.&#160; <img decoding=\"async\" style=\"border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none\" class=\"wlEmoticon wlEmoticon-smile\" alt=\"Smile\" src=\"http:\/\/209.95.55.158\/~idubbsco\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/03\/wlEmoticon-smile1.png\" \/> &#8211; Yea, not my bag, but can\u2019t talk about SPD without mentioning it\u2019s capabilities of managing and tweaking the site design.&#160; <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>There is more, but that\u2019s these are the top items that come to mind for me and deliver a lot of value in the business cases I\u2019ve seen.&#160; <\/p>\n<p>Plus \u2013 <a href=\"http:\/\/sharepoint.microsoft.com\/en-us\/product\/related-technologies\/pages\/sharepoint-designer.aspx\" target=\"_blank\">SharePoint Designer 2010<\/a> is free. So check it out. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>SPD = SharePoint Designer, currently in the 2010 version. In my previous post about using Office 365 as a learning platform for SharePoint, I briefly mentioned SharePoint Designer.&#160; But, we [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[3,9,38,10,11,12,15,21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-369","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-office-2010","category-office-365-grid","category-office365","category-sharepoint","category-sharepoint-2010","category-sharepoint-designer-2010","category-sharepoint-online"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pgWQ1-5X","jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.idubbs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.idubbs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.idubbs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.idubbs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.idubbs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=369"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.idubbs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.idubbs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=369"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.idubbs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=369"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.idubbs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=369"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}