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Watch this developer-oriented video from the Microsoft Office System Developers Conference 2006 on using SharePoint Designer 2007 to build no-code solutions.

Watch this developer-oriented video from the Microsoft Office System Developers Conference 2006 on using SharePoint Designer 2007 to customize your SharePoint sites.

This topic shows you how to create a minimal master page that includes only the minimal functionality that Office SharePoint Server 2007 requires so that you have a stable platform upon which to build your own master pages. Creating a minimal master page can help you avoid the time-consuming process of backing code out of a pre-existing .master page such as BlueBand.master, or removing functionality, and then building it back in to suit your customization needs. You can, of course, create a master page from scratch. However, we generally do not recommend this because a truly empty master page does not include all the content placeholders that the Office SharePoint Server 2007 page model needs to work correctly.

Learn how to use Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 to build productive and efficient solutions on Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies. In this webcast, we explain how you can use SharePoint Designer 2007 to create and deploy interactive Web solutions on the SharePoint platform—without writing any code. We also describe how to build reporting and tracking applications and collaborative workflows, and show you how to customize Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services application templates.

Application templates are out-of-the-box custom scenarios tailored to address the needs and requirements of specific business processes or sets of tasks in organizations of any size. They can be applied to a task, such as managing a help desk or tracking a marketing campaign, to easily create a dedicated Web-based application for a more efficient and effective way of working.

Microsoft has made available a package of four sample master page sets that were built using the new CSS and Master Page editing tools in Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007. The sample master pages provide a variety of instant styles ready to be applied to your SharePoint site. The download includes four master page sets; each set has a distinctive look and feel and comes in five color variations: blue, orange, red, purple, and green.

SharePoint Designer 2007 is a great tool for designing, developing, and customizing your Business Applications in Office Live. In this screencast Albert Shen, a software design engineer on the Office Live team, will show you the various capabilities in SharePoint Designer and how you can use them with Office Live.

Learn how to use Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 to create custom page layouts for your publishing site in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.

In this Microsoft Office Live screencast, Albert Shen shows you how to use Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 to build powerful views of your business data, and integrate them into your Office Live Business Applications. The Data Form Web Part can consume data from various data sources, including SharePoint lists, SharePoint libraries, server-side scripts, RSS feeds, XML files, databases, Web services, or an aggregation of these sources. Using ASP.NET 2.0 data source controls, the Data Form Web Part retrieves data as an XML document, and then uses XSLT to transform the data for the browser.

In this Microsoft Office Live screencast, Albert Shen shows you how to add workflows to Office Live Business Applications using Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007. Office Live is built on Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and, as a result, leverages the powerful new Windows Workflow Foundation. This screencast builds on the scenario in the "Using the Data Form Web Part in Office Live" screencast by automating the inventory order process with business logic and workflow.

This video covers two customization options that can be performed in the Search Center with Tabs: how to add custom search pages and tabs, and how to replace the XSLT for the search results with a custom XSLT. Using Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007, you can use the raw XML output to create a custom XSLT. You can make use of the powerful and rich XSLT design experience in Office SharePoint Designer 2007 to generate the XSLT for the Data View Web Part. This custom XSLT can replace the default XSLT that is used by the Search Core Results Web Part. The video illustrates the different steps.

This white paper describes how Microsoft developed the Application Templates, identifying best practices for how to work with core capabilities within both Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services and Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007, with the goal of empowering customers and partners to create their own applications.

The Apply Styles task pane displays each style according to the rules of the style, so you can quickly identify the style you want to work with just by looking at the style's visual appearance.

Use the CSS Properties task pane to quickly see all of the styles that the current selection in your Web page uses, the order of precedence of those styles, and all of the properties and values of those styles.

With the Manage Styles task pane, you can apply, modify, rename, and delete styles; attach or detach external cascading style sheets (CSS); select all instances of a style; and go to the code that contains a style's rule set.

When you design a workflow, you often want to collect information from a participant in the workflow, and then use that information for making further decisions. For example, you might want a workflow to ask a participant to review a document, and then have the workflow perform different actions depending on whether the reviewer approves or rejects the document. To accomplish this, you add the Collect Data from a User action to your workflow.

Your workflow can collect and store information from many people by assigning them a task to fill out a custom form. Those submitted values are stored in the Tasks list, where you can view them later. For example, each time that a document is added to your library, you might want several workflow participants to review the document and record their comments in a form. Those comments can then be viewed in the Tasks list by the owner of the document. To accomplish this, you add the Assign a Form to a Group action to your workflow.

When you design a workflow, you often want to assign work to a participant in the workflow. The simplest scenario is when you don't require any information from the participant — you just want to know that the work was completed so that the workflow can continue. For example, you might want several participants to review a document, but you don't need the workflow to collect their feedback or any other information; you simply want to know that the work was completed. To accomplish this, you add the Assign a To-do Item action to your workflow.

Microsoft has developed forty application templates for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 to provide out-of-the-box solutions to address the needs of specific business processes, such as coordinating a Help Desk. The purpose of this article is to describe how Microsoft developed the application templates, identifying best practices for how to work with core capabilities within both Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Office SharePoint Designer 2007, with the goal of empowering customers and partners to create their own applications.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 allows non-developers to create custom workflows in a straightforward way by using the workflow designer it provides. During the process, the user "glues" together different activities that represent the steps for the workflow. There are numerous activities one can use and the list is extensible. Developers can use Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 to build additional activities and deploy them, so that they are available in Office SharePoint Designer 2007.