SharePoint Designer 2013 is a substantially different product than either of its recent predecessors, for SharePoint 2010 and 2007. The biggest difference between these versions is the removal of the “design view” feature. The main benefit of this feature was its ability to provide users with a What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) representation of proposed changes to the graphics look and feel (brand) for SharePoint sites.
But the core benefit of this product remains the same. SharePoint Designer 2013 can still be successfully used to build workflows to automate procedures, including document creation and process management. Software programming skills are not required to produce workflows, so the production costs can be much lower than comparable production costs for hard coded systems.
System security is also likely to be better. Software amounts to “trusted solutions”. As I’ve written earlier in this blog, the whole process of building “trusted solutions” has been redesigned with Microsoft’s new app development model, to better insulate SharePoint server from any new code, whatsoever. Organizations opting for an enterprise document management (EDM) solution built with workflows built in SharePoint Designer 2013 adhere to this new model. System components are already offered by the server and no new code is required.
We are presenting an online course on this topic, which will be lead by Ira Fuchs, a published author on this topic and an acknowledged subject matter expert. The title for Ira’s online course is Cheap Thrills in SharePoint 2013. By “cheap” we mean inexpensive, and, by no means anything to do with shoddy development practices. The “thrills”, of course, amount to the substantial benefit SharePoint stakeholders can realize by implementing the methods Ira will present in the course.
Anyone considering the benefits of using SharePoint as an enterprise EDM platform should benefit from attending the course. I highly recommend interested parties take a look at the course presentation.
© Rehmani Consulting, Inc. & Ira Michael Blonder, 2013 All Rights Reserved