Kurt Shintaku's Blog

Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer is now a freely downloadable product.  Today, the Sharepoint Team Blog made the announcement on their blog.

DOWNLOAD: 
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointdesigner/HA103607611033.aspx (143MB-296MB)

SHAREPOINT PRODUCT TEAM BLOG:
http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2009/04/02/sharepoint-designer-available-as-a-free-download.aspx

This has a number of ramifications:

1. Customers can now make relatively advanced design changes to Sharepoint sites regardless of whether they are Sharepoint Server based on Windows Sharepoint Services based.
2. Relatively complex workflows can be created without any cost to businesses providing human workflow to reduce error and quicken business process.
3. End users can make customizations to pages which could potentially result in support calls if they have the “Designer” right, which Site Owners do by default.

This blog entry from the SharePoint Designer team does a good job of laying out the options available for locking down the use of SharePoint Designer on an environment if that is something to be concerned about in your organization.

Locking Down Sharepoint Designer
http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepointdesigner/archive/2008/11/25/locking-down-sharepoint-designer.aspx

To view the rights a group has on a site:

1. Browse the site
2. Site Actions menu | Site Settings
3. Under Users and Permissions, click People and Groups
4. In the Left Navigation, Click Site Permissions
5. You will get a list of groups and any users that have explicit permissions.  Clicking the name will get you the specific permissions the group has.