Disabling SharePoint Designer for Site Collections in 2010

A nice feature in SharePoint 2010 is the ability to manipulate how SharePoint Designer is used by site collection administrators. You can access the settings by going to Central Administration > General Application Settings > SharePoint Designer.

SharePoint Designer Settings in SharePoint CA 2010

 

 

 

 

 

 

What this allows you to do is allow your site collection administrators for a particular site collection to use SharePoint Designer in limited ways. You may have an site collectin admin that you think would have the skill to create workflows, but you don’t want that person messing with Master pages or page layouts.

What I wish that it offered was the ability to get more granular with the people instead of using site collection admins. There are times that you may want to give workflow ability to a single person, but not the site collection admin.

Below is the message your users will receive if you completely turn SharePoint Designer off for the site collection admins. What is not indicative in the SharePoint Designer settings is that these settings go for the Farm Administrator too, not just the Site collection admin. Another area where granularity of permissions would be nice.

SharePoint Designer