SharePoint Designer Introduction—Open a MOSS Site

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Open a MOSS Site

In SharePoint Designer select File -> Open Site and a window opens that allows you to open a previously opened site or to enter a new one as shown in Figure 5-2.

The best thing to do here is to enter your MOSS site URL into the Site name: text box. The typical format for a MOSS Site URL is http://MossServerName:port. For example, you could enter "http://YourMossServer" if a MOSS server existed on your network with that address. Next, just click the open button and you will be challenged to enter your authentication info here. Typically this requires the name of your server to be listed before your username like: "YourMossServer\Randy.Drisgill." If you are denied access, you may have to use a different user account on the server or talk to your MOSS server administrator. Typically, your user account will need to be in the SharePoint Owners or Designers groups. Also, if you are not an Owner you may need to be in the Approvers group later when it comes time to publish your changes; this is because MOSS’s publishing workflow requires an approver to finalize a published page. If you have administrative rights on your MOSS server, you can change these settings by browsing the site in your Internet browser and selecting Site Actions -> Site Settings -> Modify All Site Settings -> Users and Permissions -> People and Groups.

Figure 5.2

Once you are properly authenticated into the MOSS server, after a few seconds (depending on if you are local to the server and how slow your connection is), you should see the site open in SharePoint Designer. The Folder List pane (located in the top left of SharePoint Designer) will be populated with filenames from your site. Next time you use the Open Site menu item, you can select this site (or any other recently opened sites) from the list that is provided in the Open Site window.

It is worth noting at this point that if you chose to open another MOSS site, SharePoint Designer will open another instance of itself. This can get very confusing if you are editing two similar sites as it is easy to be on the wrong tab in the Task Bar and be editing the wrong site. (MOSS sites tend to look similar in the editor.)