Welcome to Office 2007 and SharePoint Designer!

Now that beta2 of Office is out (grab it here for free!), I think it's a great time for me to switch over from talking about FrontPage 2003 to SharePoint Designer 2007. In case you hadn't heard, a few months back we announced that Office 2007 would include a new product called SharePoint Designer, aimed specifically at enabling rapid application development for the SharePoint platform . SharePoint Designer (SPD) is very much the continuation of what we started with SharePoint app development in FrontPage XP and 2003. SPD takes the best parts of FrontPage and adds a ton of new capabilities to the Data View web part, a cool new "Workflow" designer for adding application logic to your SharePoint site, not to mention great CSS and ASP.net support. Overall, I think this change is great for fans of building apps on SharePoint. Since Microsoft now has a dedicated product, Expression Web Designer, for addressing the needs of web designers, we as the SharePoint Designer team can focus all of our efforts on building the absolute best design tool for SharePoint.