Locking down SharePoint Designer (SPD)

One day, I was getting “This web site has been configured to disallow editing with SharePoint Designer. Contact your web site administrator for more information” error while opening my SharePoint site from SharePoint Designer (SPD), after that I have found that one of my admin people change into site definition file onet.xml to restrict us from opening SharePoint designer.

 

Actually we have faced lots of problem while considering SharePoint site access, because when we were giving designer or full control rights to any users for SharePoint site, they can do customization from SharePoint Designer (SPD) tool also, but as per our requirements, only admin people can do customization from SPD, user who has designer or full control rights into SharePoint site, we would like to control them from using SPD tool.

 

I spend good amount of time for finding out the solution, but till now I didn’t find any exact and perfect solution which will best suites and fits for my requirements, because in SharePoint site, all permission are dependent on each other, so if I remove access for ‘Add and Customize Pages permission” level then “Manage Web Site” permission will be also remove from Site Permission section.

  

We can control and lock down SPD In below level.

 

1. Site level, it’s prevent user from opening all site created from specific site definition


2. Web Application level for all users


3. Web Application level per users or groups


4. Site collection level


5. Site collection level from SPD(Contributor settings)

 

We can find many good information regarding how to lock down SPD, but guys believe me that below link giving me very good useful information and main thing, it combine and describes all possible way into one article only.

 

I’ll update my post; if I find any proper solution to locking down SPD for particular set of users with full permission access into SharePoint site from GUI.

 

Reference Link:

 

http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepointdesigner/archive/2008/11/25/locking-down-sharepoint-designer.aspx Link contains very useful information describing user security for locking down SharePoint Designer.

 

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/940958/en-us : how to change onet.xml file for disallowing users from opening SharePoint Designer