SharePoint Designer Room for Improvement

Heidi Wang - PeerSpot reviewer
CSV at Agilent Technologies, Inc.

It is a good solution for small companies. Although, SharePoint does not have enough resources to cover the security parts. Most users do not know a lot about technical and security things, but this feature should be there because everyone wants to feel protected.

I’d like to learn more things. For example, I have several pictures and just want to put them on my DVD. The SharePoint Designer could give me a good recommendation for it. While at the same time, I want to use the original template. It’s the SharePoint Designer that gave me the original solution.

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Vivek Vaibhav - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager at Bain & Company

Exporting the whole SharePoint website is an issue. For example, let's say I want to deploy it in the client environment. Right now, this was based on our own company's environment and if I wanted to deploy that onto the client's environment. To do this, I will have to recreate everything from scratch, which takes a lot of time. There should be a way somewhere where I can download the custom designs I have made and upload them to the client servers so that we can configure them on their servers. 

Secondly, when you have uploaded data, for example, from an Excel spreadsheet, you download it in the form of a dot IQY file. This IQY file is a bit tough to work with as it's a server-side file. If there was any option where you could just download the flat files and work with them, that would have been great. 

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OA
Senior Sharepoint Developer at Zak Solutions for Computer Systems

The search capabilities need to be improved. They tried to make it better in the 2019 version, however, there's still more they can do. 

If the design code is in HTML, there is a bit of freezing that happens when opening in Sharepoint. 

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Buyer's Guide
SharePoint Designer
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about SharePoint Designer. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
768,578 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Bala Hamisu - PeerSpot reviewer
Planner at Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation

For me, it's flexible enough for most things. But maybe they could improve the user interface to make it easier for everyone to navigate and use. That would be a big plus.

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Raphael Haroun  Ikyagh - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Administrator at Letshego

There is room for improvement in the setup process. 

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OC
Lean Manager at GrupoPhoenix

The user interface is sometimes not user-friendly.

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Vladimir Vasilev - PeerSpot reviewer
Digital Lead at Baker Tilly

I have no notes for improvement. 

The solution does not need any additional features. 

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Joe Seaborne - PeerSpot reviewer
Office 365 Administrator/IBM Notes Administrator at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

The designer itself could be improved, as it isn't particularly intuitive. 

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CG
Medical Engineering Consultants at a import and exporter with 51-200 employees

Adding guest users is a bit difficult on SharePoint.

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AM
System administrator at Export-Import Bank of Malaysia Berhad

It's a web-based tool that is sufficient enough for me.

In the solution, if you have a case of accidental deletion, there's no restoration, which should have been there. This can help in restoration in case of accidental deletion happening.

Pricing and stability could be improved.

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MN
Client Support Team at WIT

The search function should improve in the solution.

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Deepak Dhar - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior delivery manager at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

SharePoint Designer's integration with Microsoft tools could be improved.

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Kauthar Yakub - PeerSpot reviewer
Program Manager at Tereta

We'd like it if we got less frequent updates. 

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Syed Fahad Anwar - PeerSpot reviewer
Principal System Developer at HHRC

The pain point of SharePoint Designer is sometimes it gives you issues that can be resolved mostly by clearing the cache, but Microsoft should still work on it and make the product more stable.

Another issue related to SharePoint Designer is that with the newer SharePoint versions, Microsoft hasn't released a newer version of SharePoint Designer. Instead, Microsoft is recommending that you use the same old SharePoint Designer 2013. If Microsoft updates SharePoint Designer, the product will be more beneficial.

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JA
Owner / Business developer at Altier Enterprises

I want the tool to be more approachable to people. I would like to see AI integration with the tool's future versions. 

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ChristianBegaux - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant DMS/ECM at Boint / Doc

One of the problems with SharePoint is that it claims to have so many features that people think they can do everything, and that is not correct. If you want to do everything, you're going to spend a lot of money to achieve your goals. Essentially, the marketing from Microsoft is very positive but from a consultancy point of view, it gets us in trouble because people have unrealistic expectations of the solution.

SharePoint is too complex to install and maintain.

The admin interface is poor, making it too complex to manage projects.

The integration with other products is poor. There are too many instances where we needed to call a third-party software company because functionality tried by the user in the other solution was not covered by SharePoint.

In the future, SharePoint needs to cover more of our needs for us to continue using it. For example, the workflow is not correctly integrated.

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SS
Chief Digitalization Executive at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The integration with SharePoint online is missing certain features. 

It needs to align with PowerApps and Power Automate. 

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AU
Manager Mineral Resource at a mining and metals company with 10,001+ employees

Power Apps has certain limitations as it is designed primarily for tablets. When deployed on a computer, it becomes much smaller. I am currently facing the challenge of maximizing its functionality on a computer. This is one of the downsides of Power Apps.

SharePoint Designer needs filter options for lists and libraries. I want to create user groups and subgroups of users to apply properties to the metadata. Currently, I'm struggling to find a workaround.

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SujinFrancis - PeerSpot reviewer
Finance at Valuexpa

The system can become slow which should be improved.

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Javeed Khan - PeerSpot reviewer
Associate Director at NTT DATA

SharePoint Designer could improve most in analytics and reporting.

In a future release, SharePoint Designer can improve by implementing a headless solution, where we can create pages without headers.

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SS
Assistant consultant at Vvolve management consultants

Microsoft could include more applications in this. And if more applications are included, then it can be scalable that way.

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SK
Consultant at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

The record management and digital signature sides need improvement because we still need to rely on other third-party tools. 

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RK
Chief Information Technology Officer at BMC Solutions

SharePoint Designer could be improved by being more user-friendly. I think that they have a new release, but the focus is on Power Automate, not Designer. Designer's interface is somewhat classical, but it should be more user-friendly. 

Designer should contain more features. Right now, we are doing the development of web parts on Visual Studio and doing the branding on Designer. If it were possible to merge them both into one tool, it would be easier. 

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Rishi Pande - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant at ATOS

The downside is the different versions of SharePoint which means we need to have different designers as not all versions are compatible. 

In the future, we would like to have support for SharePoint online and the latest standards of UX. 

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RA
Corporate Website Manager, Manager of Technical Documentation at a manufacturing company with 5,001-10,000 employees

We work mostly with documentation and we'd like to have  it be more of a web-based. Right now, our product, our system is only set up for PDF and we're looking for a better web-based solution for our documentation.

The solution requires more web-based publishing. It would benefit from adding in more collaboration features as well.

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PB
Senior Architect at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Because things are moving toward the cloud, they should design a pin in SharePoint Designer that would be great because we do some coding for that.

SharePoint Designer should be integrated with SharePoint, for example, SharePoint Online can be integrated with SharePoint Designer to perform activities such as backup and restoration, that would provide a great advantage for developers and administrators. Naturally, this integration would also help Microsoft grow its SharePoint market.

We use Power Automate in the cloud, it would be great if we could do that with SharePoint Designer and publish it to the cloud. It would be nice if we could work offline, too. It is not always necessary to be online. The modern platform, from Microsoft Modern UI, is easily designed with integrated teams within SharePoint Designer, which will be a great advantage.

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Ghislaine-Resplandy - PeerSpot reviewer
Cloud Engineers at Qair

Unfortunately Microsoft announced a few years ago that the last update for SharePoint Designer was released on August 2, 2016 and that Microsoft Flow will be the workflow designer and engine going forward.


I would add Nintex or all of the Nintex workflow to the solution if I could. I would add them to SharePoint Designer so that I would need to use only one workflow designer. Right now, I'm using SharePoint Designer and Nintex, and it would be better to centralize it.

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KB
Lead Consultant at a computer software company with 5,001-10,000 employees

SharePoint Designer doesn't support the features that are available in the latest version of SharePoint Online. 

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Murad Musleh - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Engineer at Yemen Mobile Company, Public Yemeni Joint-Stock Company

We would like to see an improvement in the stability and overall consistency of performance in this solution.

We would also like to have more step by step instructions on build and customization, so that those without a programming background can easily use the tool.

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TA
Senior Consultant at SpeedNet Litimed

From what I read online, it depends on what you use the program for. I think the customization and migration need to improve. Upgrading should be simpler without too many things you need to change or repair. 

SharePoint Designer should be more practical and become an extension of Visual Studio. Because Visual Studio is a universal development platform. So I don't want to have to switch my user ID every time. So it should be more flexible and more of a mobile app version and integration with other solutions.  

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ALMAS AHMED - PeerSpot reviewer
Solution Architect | Managed Network Services | Enterprise Practices at a comms service provider with 5,001-10,000 employees

The solution is not very flexible when trying to access the solution via a personal PC.

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AC
Co-founder at Atidan

I would like to see SharePoint improve the integration with different systems. I also would like to see more customization.

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SD
Technical Coordinator at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

I would like to see some improvements when assigning a task. For instance, when you create a task or a subtask, there should be a better workflow. At this stage, we can't CC any names in the sent box. We can only use a "to" address. So when I want to send an email, I have to write a custom code through .NET and then send the mail. It takes up a lot of my time. Then I also found that there was a requirement from one of my customers that they want this option in the taskbar too. For instance, when the email gets sent, they want a CC option as well. 

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EB
CEO at a tech vendor with 1-10 employees

SharePoint Designer could improve by making the searching feature better. It is not accurate in some cases, and there are some descriptions that are not clear.

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BP
Solutions Manager - Collaborative Platform at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

The solution is a bit complex. They should work to simplify it. 

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MS
Owner at Alopex ONE UG

I would like to see the complete mapping of our data types, including previews, which were switched off at some point.

It would be helpful to have the SharePoint Designer capabilities built directly into SharePoint itself, into the management page, so as to create an online version of it directly in SharePoint.

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JF
Founding Member /Technical Director at BonPro Information Systems

The solution can be improved with a reduction in price. 

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it_user909396 - PeerSpot reviewer
Solution Architect at Al

SharePoint Designer is not releasing a new version. Version 2013 was the latest version. Now in 2019, we are still using the biggest version. It doesn't work properly anymore. Sometimes we experience issues, but there is no new version. 

There are many things that could be improved in SharePoint Designer. The user interface definitely is a very old design, but as a developer, I would concentrate more on the functionality. With the newer interfaces, just basic functionality is provided to explore the content. The editing method should be changed, as inline editing is not recommended. Now we create apps, which can change the user interface and the functionality as well.

There are some features that need to be worked out with the current version. There are several issues, but I can't think of them right now. There are lots of things that we to in newer versions. We use other tools for that, but that functionality was not possible with SharePoint Designer.

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OA
SharePoint Developer at Zak solutions

Sometimes when I create my HTML page it is very slow and I don't know why. It's just stuck. I think that the performance needs to be enhanced.

If you compare the workflow with other engines like Olympus and K2, it is very complicated to create a workflow.

In the next release, I would like ready-made workflows that I can re-use and a way to apply a design for the master base that is less complicated.

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RI
Consultant at a comms service provider with 201-500 employees

The solution has limitations when it comes to exploration.

The web services aspect of the solution is very weak.

If the requirements are moderate, the solution is okay, but for more complex requirements, I need to use the solution in combination with other solutions. It doesn't offer everything I need.

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AE
Technical Director at wbn

I believe Microsoft does not support Sharepoint on-premises. They only support Sharepoint on the Cloud. They should provide for both options and let the client choose their preference.

The solution should have a better workflow with the craft, and also offer some configurations to help drive workflow.

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HK
SharePoint Module Lead at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

SharePoint Online should continue to integrate with other solutions.

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AG
GBM at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The interface of SharePoint Designer could be improved, such as in SAP.

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JB
Owner with 51-200 employees

SharePoint is not a great product. It can be much better in many ways. 

The collaboration tools for editing do not work right and malfunction often.

It has a lot of bugs. It's also not very convenient. The UX/UI is not very user-friendly and not designed to be similar to other applications from Microsoft. 

The management functionality should be much easier. 

The dialogue with end users needs improvement. If you are a manager of SharePoint, sometimes it's hard to know what exactly the user would like to have. There should be more intelligent services or features available, which would make it easier for end users. 

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MB
SharePoint Developer

This solution could definitely be made easier to use.

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JJ
Business Solutions Architect at a real estate/law firm with 501-1,000 employees

Many aspects of the solution need improvement. It does not make use of modern deployment. You should also be able to separate your concerns between the code and the environment. It should become a development environment rather than a customization tool.

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PS
Assistant Director at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

The pricing is a little bit high and can be reduced. If we could pay for a single license that covers the whole organization then it would be better than paying fees based on the size of our user base.

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KM
Cloud Solution Architect at a tech services company with 1-10 employees

I think the product will soon not be supported anymore due to the new way of using those components in Microsoft flow and power apps. I have heard that Microsoft is not going to lease SharePoint Designer anymore.

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Buyer's Guide
SharePoint Designer
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about SharePoint Designer. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
768,578 professionals have used our research since 2012.