Overview
The CorasWorks Design Manager is an application that serves two purposes, neither of which require any development work:
•Easily change the design of an existing SharePoint page to a different SharePoint design, perhaps to give it a new custom look, a brand, or a new logo.
•Easily deploy pre-configured web parts from an existing SharePoint page to one or more other 2007 pages. For example, you could take an active display that accesses a help desk request system and enables users to add new requests, and push it onto multiple sites.
These powerful capabilities make the Design Manager the fastest, simplest, and most-cost effective approach to migrating and updating site designs in SharePoint.
The Design Manager can be run from either a server or from a user’s desktop, as long as the user is at least a site administrator on the affected site(s). When run from a server, the user must also be a server administrator.
NOTE 1: Before you begin to use the Design Manager, you should be aware of the way in which it manages web part zone IDs that do not match between the page being used as a template and the pages being migrated. For a complete discussion, please see Web Part Zone IDs.
NOTE 2: The Design Manager works across multiple environments, as long as they are all on the same configuration database.
The Design Manager can also be used to apply a different design to an existing SharePoint page. It works in a similar manner as the example above, except the source page is the 2007 page with the design you want to replace. The end result is that the design on the source page is updated to the design defined on the “template” page.
Another convenient use of the Design Manager is to quickly add pre-configured web parts to one or more existing pages.
For example, you could configure an active display that enables users to manage their help desk requests and add new requests. The active display could be configured so that it is grouped by status, so the currently logged in user could easily keep track of their outstanding requests. It could also include an action to add a new request. Then, the URL of the page on which the web part is located could be referenced as a template page by the Design Manager, and the configured active display could be quickly and easily deployed for use in any number of other solutions.