You can now download Microsoft’s Sharepoint Designer free.
Microsoft Office Sharepoint Designer 2010 – one of the successors to Frontpage 2003 for customising Microsoft Sharepoint web sites is now a free download.
With registration you can get the 254MB or less download from Microsoft.
That might be a little annoying for the companies that have paid good money for Sharepoint Designer as part of a Software Assurance licence with Microsoft. In an effort to placate those who have paid – Software Assurance customers of Sharepoint Designer at 1 April 2009 will receive upgrade rights to Expression Web (another Microsoft web design product).
Sharepoint Designer will be updated with the next release of Sharepoint while future versions of Expression Web are promised to include Sharepoint capabilities that are currently missing.
The stated aim is to allow Expression Web and other Expression products to “empower professional designers with page customization capabilities on SharePoint” while continuing to have Sharepoint Designer as a separate product.
The split between SharePoint Designer and Expression Web was always a strange one and it looks like continuing.
