Protect Yourself Against SharePoint Designer

SharePoint Designer provides you with a set tools to brand and customize SharePoint, build efficient applications on top of the Microsoft SharePoint platform, but most of all it makes navigation in your SharePoint site(s) very easy. Not for nothing it made my 9 Excellent Resources for and about Branding SharePoint list. But SharePoint Designer in the wrong hands can seriously damage your SharePoint sites!

Robert Bogue, a SharePoint MVP, discusses the need for governance with SharePoint Designer on his blog. I highly recommend reading this if you are an administrator, consultant, or are involved in SharePoint deployments.

Because SharePoint Designer is free, any user can just download and install it from here. If you work in an enterprise-level organization, you probably already have policies in place that control what can be installed on user PCs, but even then it might be wise to restrict access from SharePoint Designer to your sites.

Here comes the good news. There are actually options to restrict the access of SharePoint Designer to your preciously builded and maintained SharePoint sites. There are options for locking down SharePoint Designer:

• At the server level per site definition
• At the Web application level for all users
• At the Web application level per user or group
• At the site level per user or group
• At the site level per user or group
• Per computer or per user

All the different options are very nicely explained in this post on the Microsoft SharePoint Designer Team Blog.

Have a look at the posts mentioned, and decide for yourself how far you want to go in protecting yourself from SharePoint Designer. Better be save, then sorry...

Related Posts

• SharePoint Manager 2007
• 9 Excellent Resources for and about Branding SharePoint