Let me first start by saying that SharePoint Designer (SPD) is not for everyone. I believe it does have its place with the Power Users, and Site Administrators within the organization, but if not used properly, it can severely damage your sites and potentially your whole Portal. My reasons for liking it are the following features in SPD: Creating Sites and Lists and Libraries within those sites Being able to backup your sites or site collections. Also, you can restore your site at any location Designing powerful Workflows for a list or library within a site Using the Data View …

Web parts can be targeted to a specific audience in order to push information in front of a group of people for whom it’s relevant. Using this feature, you can place several web parts on a page, but when a user navigates to the page, they only see the web parts which are relevant to them. An audience that you target the web parts to can be a SharePoint Group, Active Directory Security Group or Distribution List, or even a Global Audience (which by the way is setup through the Shared Services administration). The intended target audience is specified from …