Microsoft’s investment to ease SP 2013 design implementation benefits *all* SharePoint professionals

November 14th, 2012, by Ben Hungerford

The (excellent) Tuesday morning session at SPC 12, “Best Practices for Designing Websites with SharePoint 2013” was presented to an elbow-to-elbow standing room only crowd of SharePoint professionals, and the new features and best practices presented in the session elicited applause from the crowd (and frequent hooting from one person in front of me).  On the surface it’s a strange room to find an Engineer in, whether SP Practice Lead or no, but I suspect the crowd represented a cross-section of SP pros of all different disciplines.

Microsoft has obviously put a lot of effort into making SharePoint design implementable by non-SharePoint experts, and even better, by non-.NET developers. They’ve accomplished this by virtually rewriting their front end, beating the .NET engine itself into submission, throwing away all their CSS from 2010, and focusing on the user experience of designing for SharePoint.  This is great news for anyone who wants to build a beautiful Internet or Intranet site on SharePoint. It’s good news for anyone with a requirement for strong mobile support.

This is great news for a whole new generation of SharePoint designers that have just had a massive barrier to entry removed. However, I’d suggest it’s especially great news for the SharePoint developers out there today that have been honing their .NET skills while wrestling with SharePoint Designer over the last versions of the product. Those developers have been emancipated from the shackles of Page Layouts and Master Pages. Just let the designers do that – and the developers can go forth and build some Apps!