SharePoint Directions

I wanted to comment on what I see has been the general direction of SharePoint over the last couple of versions and the issues that arise from that.

Have you ever wondered why you can only change the master page in SharePoint once publishing has been turned on? I can see no technical reason. It seems simply that the UI component to do so was packaged with publishing because it wasn't there from the start and had to be packaged somewhere, even though it has nothing to do with publishing at all.

Of course this wouldn't be a problem except that once you turn on publishing you can't generate a site template, or if you do with any of the various workarounds, it is officially unsupported by Microsoft.

You can however change the master page in SP Designer regardless of publishing. In fact there are a whole bunch of features that should be in SharePoint that can only be done in designer. For exmaple if you want to include the standard left menu in a new page, you have to edit the page in SP Designer.

If you wanted SP Designer then you used to have to pay extra money. But many of these features should arguably have been in SharePoint itself. I think that's why Microsoft relented and decided to make SP Designer free, because that would be cheaper than to have to add all this functionality back into SharePoint directly.

The problem is that SP Designer includes a whole lot of functionality that would prevent it from being deployed to secured production environments. The last two large clients I worked for will not allow it to be deployed to anything higher than the developer environment.

And now it seems that Visual Studio is becoming the preferred tool for dealing with many of the things that SP Designer might have done, but there is no way I'm going to get VS deployed in an environment that already rejects SP Designer.

These tools are fine for more complicated and genuine development tasks but they are simply over-kill and over-complex for things like changing a master page or choosing a page layout that includes the left menu.