SharePoint Designer 2013: Introduction

Microsoft announced release of beta versions of their office products. This includes SharePoint Server 2013 and SharePoint Designer 2013. Through my blog I will try to focus on many new features in SharePoint Server 2013 and SharePoint Designer 2013. To start with I am writing a series of articles on SharePoint Designer 2013 workflows. In this article I will talk about changes in SharePoint Designer 2013.

First of all new designer looks very cool. It follows the Metro design similar to Office 2013.

SharePoint Designer 2013 will support both SP2010 and SP2013 sites.

One of the major change is SharePoint Designer 2013 will not support design view and split view for pages. In TechNet article Microsoft states that, “The design view technology is not as up-to-date as the current Internet Explorer. In addition, code view is much more widely used than design view. Design view cannot support the new tags in HTML5 and new cascading style sheets that are used in SharePoint 2013 Preview”.

For Workflow developers there are plenty of changes and exciting features added.

SharePoint workflows will now be hosted on new ‘Windows Azure Workflow (WAW)’ server. We can create farm of multiple WAW servers and connect SharePoint farm to it.

‘Stage’ is the new feature added to workflow similar to ‘Step’. We can add one or more ‘Step’ in to the ‘Stage’. But what is step? Answer is very interesting and really I liked ‘Stage’ very much. I am going to talk about it in next article.

One more feature is introduction of ‘Views’ in designer workflows. Now we can create/switch views of designer workflows.

Available views are Text based designer view, Visual Designer view and Stage view.

I will talk about them in my series of articles for SharePoint Designer 2013.

So stay tuned…