2017 UPDATE: if you are looking how to use SharePoint Designer 2013 with SharePoint Online / 2016, then please check out : “There is no SharePoint Designer 2016, but you can still use SharePoint Designer 2013“.
If you followed the social activity on the web ‘post ignite’ you may seen that SharePoint Designer may be killed off in SharePoint 2016. See Ben’s tweet after a session he attended :
Is this for real? If so, what’s going to replace it (if anything). I suspect this is just part of the general move to stop the amount of ‘customisations’ that customer’s currently do in SharePoint. Microsoft can’t maintain and support these long term (as it shackles innovation in the product), so I think it’s probably a good thing. There are often other ways to achieve the same thing in most cases.
What do you think? Will you miss it?
Microsoft is not releasing a new version of SharePoint Designer. However, SharePoint Designer 2013 will work fine in SharePoint 2016. There really isn’t any difference between 2016 and 2013 that would cause issues with designer.
Since SharePoint is moving toward being more of a service that is extensible using the client APIs, there is less need to build support for more tooling into SPD itself. All of the existing methods to make updates in SharePoint should still work in SPD 2013, but if you embrace the new methods to customize SharePoint you won’t need SPD (as much) but you may need a web developer. You can use any modern web development tool (or even notepad) to make customizations. I understand Power Users will still be using SPD going forward and I assume SPD2013 will work just fine for SP2016 customizations.
Future of SharePoint “…although we will continue to support custom workflows built with SharePoint Designer and hosted on SharePoint Server 2016 and Office 365.” from – https://blogs.office.com/2016/01/20/sharepoint-server-2016-and-project-server-2016-release-candidate-available/.
As mentioned in my post (URL below), Microsoft Flow was announced as a new service for automating workflow across the growing number of apps and SaaS services.
With Power Apps you can create automated workflows between your favorite apps and services to get notifications, synchronise files, collect data, and more.
The new version of tool is dead but you can still use SP2013 Designer to open and change layouts of SP2016 master pages/site pages
Hello,
SharePoint Designer is free tool which have multiple version and use to do the customization’s, workflow development and branding of SharePoint Applications. SharePoint Designer 2007, SharePoint Designer 2010 and SharePoint Designer 2013 work with MOSS 2007, SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint 2013 respectively. SharePoint Designer 2013 also used for SharePoint Online to do customization’s, branding, workflow development and many other tasks. Things are still unclear what will be substitute of SharePoint Designer in SharePoint 2016, OR Microsoft going to introduce a new tool for as a substitute of SharePoint Designer OR all the customization will be performed using web browser as Microsoft already introduced Design Manager in SharePoint Server 2013 for branding so it is possibility that all customization will be performed using browser interface. This can be a good option as a new Browser Edge is also new windows version Windows 10, but anyways SharePoint Designer lovers including me will miss this product who use it for doing most of the customization and haters who always raise issues on SharePoint Designer will also gonna miss this product.
Alexander Jackson
https://www.clouddesktoponline.com
