2017 UPDATE: if you are looking how to use SharePoint Designer 2013 with SharePoint Online / 2016, then please check out : “There is no SharePoint Designer 2016, but you can still use SharePoint Designer 2013“.
If you followed the social activity on the web ‘post ignite’ you may seen that SharePoint Designer may be killed off in SharePoint 2016. See Ben’s tweet after a session he attended :
Is this for real? If so, what’s going to replace it (if anything). Â I suspect this is just part of the general move to stop the amount of ‘customisations’ that customer’s currently do in SharePoint. Microsoft can’t maintain and support these long term (as it shackles innovation in the product), so I think it’s probably a good thing. There are often other ways to achieve the same thing in most cases.
What do you think? Will you miss it?
Microsoft is not releasing a new version of SharePoint Designer. However, SharePoint Designer 2013 will work fine in SharePoint 2016. There really isn’t any difference between 2016 and 2013 that would cause issues with designer.
Since SharePoint is moving toward being more of a service that is extensible using the client APIs, there is less need to build support for more tooling into SPD itself. All of the existing methods to make updates in SharePoint should still work in SPD 2013, but if you embrace the new methods to customize SharePoint you won’t need SPD (as much) but you may need a web developer. You can use any modern web development tool (or even notepad) to make customizations. I understand Power Users will still be using SPD going forward and I assume SPD2013 will work just fine for SP2016 customizations.
