Comments on: SharePoint Designer 2013 Design View is Gone! – effects Data View web part and List View web part

By: Bisi

Bisi — Fri, 10 May 2013 19:51:15 +0000

Does Microsoft think about their customers or just make decisions they feel is ok for them. They need to learn from other technology companies whose product are built on customer’s advise and need.

By: depova

depova — Sun, 21 Apr 2013 20:11:55 +0000

This is much more serious than “no skylight”. This is more like for the last 6 years we’ve been buying homes that already had walls and ceilings and all we had to do was paint and move in. Now the new homes have no walls or ceilings and we have to build these ourselves. Problem is not all of us are contractors.

I’ve got dozens of no code designs, dataviews, and custom forms that I can no longer support becaue they were upgraded to sharepoint 2013 in O365. This presents a nightmare scenerio for me.

By: DianeK

DianeK — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 14:16:26 +0000

Hi All.

Like many others have expressed here, this is a game changer for me too.

I had been a coder in the world of classic ASP but got fully immersed in SP over the past 9 years. I have been working with companies to help the optimize what had been fabulously powerful features of SP2007 and SP2010, particularly the DVWP and custom workflow. The big ROI for all of these many, many businesses was the fact that they did NOT need to invest huge $$$$ in .NET development, code maintenance, upgrade factors, etc., but still got powerful application solutions and SPD was the driving force behind all of that.

My recommendation to my customers and all business I work with will be to avoid SP2013 at all costs. I have a few SMBs who bought into Office 365 and who had robust SP sites through their subscription. One has been upgraded to SP2013, and working with their very complex DVWPs (conditional formatting and other special features) and workflow is now a nightmare. Now my costs for working on their project has skyrocketed and they are not happy. I am trying to find a way to move them from Office 365 to some other hosted platform (any suggestions?).

And another thing… having been an early web developer I remember the days when all we had were code editors like Word Pad, and I remember how we were all thrilled when development studios were introduced and these IDEs have become the standard. I ask, what developer, of any kind, anywhere is using a IDE that DOES NOT have a visual option???

I am now looking for alternatives to SP for my business and my customers. Like Stephen Bonds mentions above, I was touting the virtues of SP as a COTS product to my customers for the power of its no-code solutions and OOB features. So much for that!

Microsoft has now virtually eliminated the “power user” and thrust all of that back onto IT and developers! Nice work once again, Microsoft!

By: Isidro

Isidro — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 19:11:19 +0000

Uggg! So let me get this straight… my house doesn’t have a skylight, and it’s the standard to have skylights, so burn down the house?! And I spend more time at work more then at home… so it’s ok to burn it down because of that too? Blah… this doesn’t make since.

By: bnw

bnw — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 14:40:13 +0000

Awful decision. Rethinking any recommendation to take company to Sharepoint 2013.

By: JMartin

JMartin — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 00:48:34 +0000

I’m so glad to see this article – if only to confirm my worst fears! Now I am really bummed out to see my last 5 years of sharepoint knowledge go down the job market hill.

I’m a power user, designer, and site collections administrator, and I definitely stay away from code as much as possible. With this change, I may fall off the “support sharepoint” wagon for our organization. Businesses just don’t have much money to spend on developers – and at least in the past, Sharepoint development could go to power users for basic, easy customization, and to developers for more sophisticated development. Most users do not use sharepoint out of the box, because it does not have great usability without customization. Visual appeal is a very strong factor in whether sharepoint strategies succeed or not. Who thinks that companies are going to spend money on a consultant to make a column look visually “nice”? That said, I don’t think MS will keep its market share of users if it becomes another program that “only developers” can understand and customize. I don’t actually know too many users who LOVE sharepoint! I like it, because of the capabilities it has NOW in SP 2010. However, I’m not sure if it would be in my best interest to become a programmer just to support Sharepoint, as there are other technologies out there that are just as good or better. Google is starting to reach into the collaboration market – so perhaps that’s where the power users like me will go. That, or drupal.

By: SharePoint 2010 ECMA Script | Share your knowledge

SharePoint 2010 ECMA Script | Share your knowledge — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 10:15:11 +0000

[...] http://blog.sharepoint-videos.com/sharepoint-designer-2013-data-view-web-part-list-view-web-part-des… [...]

By: Karl

Karl — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 15:37:25 +0000

This is a major deal, and unfortunately one I wasn’t as prepared for as I would like to have been. Been working on getting a SharePoint 2013 portal up and configured for a couple weeks. Things that I used to do easily in SharePoint 2010 require a lot more work. For instance, the company I’m doing this for has a guide from their marketing group on the corporate colors. So now I’m supposed to know / understand how changing “75736D” to “FFBBEE” for the “SubtleEmphasisText” tag in the Pallette008.spcolor file in \_catalogs\theme\15 is supposed to change the look of the website? Seriously?

I used to tell my SharePoint customers that branding was harder to get over people’s preferences than to implement. Now I’m more likely to just say “Pick one of the themes Microsoft gives you and live with it.”

By: Stephen Bounds

Stephen Bounds — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 01:33:15 +0000

Great post. Not surprised although disappointed. I’ve seen the writing on the wall about moving to a developer’s platform instead of an end-user configurable platform for a while now.

Whenever I’ve talked to Microsoft about missing core capabilities of their platform (for example, the completely bizarre move to split Blogs and Comments off from their core Content Publishing templates), their response has always been “Oh, that’s easy, just get a developer to write X, Y, and Z.”

But perhaps …
… we don’t /want/ to spend $20,000 to recreate functionality that exists inside an arbitrary silo?
… we don’t /want/ to have custom code requiring maintenance and updates?
… we don’t /want/ to have our users constantly needing our help to implement trivial enhancements?

They have always been tone deaf about the fact that the advantage of COTS is NO CODE. I suppose it comes from working inside a coder’s culture…

By: Victor Utz

Victor Utz — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 14:32:03 +0000

This is a very big change for lower-level users who would be able to modify basic formatting and layout in data view parts without being a developer. I am a software trainer/consultant and in many cases, line of business people who have basic IT skills want to be able to add some conditional formatting or maybe a new item form onto a page and through some simple steps could do it entirely in Design View. This meant that their company could affect changes they wanted with only a minimal investment in some training rather than spending large amounts of cash on contracting a developer or sending their IT folks to extensive web developer training. The folks who will really benefit from this are skilled developers since their demand will skyrocket. I have been in this business since the 90s and its just amazing to see a company just completly remove a level of capability from their product.