Microsoft's SharePoint Designer was a tool for developing SharePoint applications that has been discontinued.
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Progress Telerik
Score 10.0 out of 10
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With Telerik UI libraries, Progress aims to equip .NET ninjas with a full arsenal of weapons, helping to create beautiful, modern and future-proof applications quickly and intuitively. The vendor states that with its over 1,250 UI components for all .NET platforms, as well as various themes, skins and customization options, Telerik users report cutting development time by up to 50 percent. Web
Well Suited - WORKFLOWS! To a SharePoint Developer, workflows are like a hammer to a carpenter. If there is a business process that needs automation, the first thing I look to is what are we automating? What/where is the data? How can we minimize the number of keystrokes by end-users to get from the start to finish? The answer to all of these is "build a workflow". With the introduction of "Call HTTP Web Service" action, you can now access data anywhere in a site collection and consume it in any site, on any list, for any form. SharePoint Designer Workflows makes the SharePoint world go round. Less Appropriate - Building SharePoint Pages I have attempted to use SharePoint Designer to build custom pages, but it just is the worst tool to use. There are many other tools to use to develop customized pages. The techniques of designing custom page layouts, CSS files to populate in pages, JavaScript Snippets for pages have changed so much over the years, and SharePoint Designer did not change with them. In fact, it is my opinion the 2013 version made it 100 times more difficult than the 2010 Version.
Progress Telerik UI is one of the best web design and development solutions for Dot Net based applications. It has extensible support for ASP.NET Core, C#, WCF, and ASP.NET WebForms. It overall improves the design structure for the applications and provides multiple customization options to meet the requirements of clients and end-users.
SharePoint Designer offers more granularity of customizing a workflow that is more sophisticated solution that can effectively delegate tasks to responsible parties and reflects status updates of task status.
SharePoint Designer allows SharePoint professionals the ability to customize a SharePoint site with HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript that can be integrated in .ASPX pages.
SharePoint Designer offers form customization where Office products such as Word, Excel or PowerPoint cannot meet specific government requirements and or expectations.
Navigation between sub-sites and beyond the entry point is not seamless. I find it difficult to get to the root of a directory structure if I have not started there.
Would love to be able to do WYSIWYG in some form. I have only used it for a year but I have not found anything fancy to do.
I would like to be able to work in a development site and easily move to the production site.
The Telerik UI has become part of our staple development tools. We can not be as productive without the feature set available to us in the Telerik UI ASP.NET AJAX control package.
The UX of their UI is very well thought out, the micro-interactions are intuitive - thus great for your end user as less training is needed. Using the software, there [are] loads to get you going, you can download their whole demo site and see how each demo works. There is more now on github to get you started, also much on an awesome CDN that's well bedded in so your app is speedy and up to date.
Support is good from Microsoft. They are quite responsive when we raise a ticket but SP Designer support will be ended by Microsoft in the near future as they have got new techs like PowerApps and Flow to achieve the same functionality SP Designer does and even more than that.
Progress Telerik UI customer support is pretty good. The ticketing system allows a thread of questions, answers, and attachments of code and screenshots. Response time is fairly quick and often has code snippets or pointers to online examples that could be relevant. There is a large amount of community support forums to get answers or post questions. In addition there is a forum of posted code samples for the various controls. The Progress update tool easily tells you what products have been updated and allows you to install the updates on your development system. Release notes can be displayed to see what's new.
In order to simplify our internal workflows, we have installed additionnal tool for our SharePoint platforms : Nintex Workflow and forms. Compared to Nintex, SharePoint Designer is very far away. I am only talking here for 2 main features of SharePoint Designer : - Workflows - Forms But for these 2 features, Nintex is way above SharePoint Designer
The Telerik controls were just easier for us to use and implement. Our evaluation of control packages was over 9 years ago, so it is hard to recall the major differences. Generally, the team preferred what Telerik had to offer, particularly the fact that the bundle provided controls, not just for the ASP.NET context, but also Windows applications, and the cross-platform contexts as well.
With workflows alone we have had a positive ROI because it gives us increased functionality and value with a smaller amount of development time needed.
The testing of workflows or pages is more structured and we have less base cases than a ground-up customized development solution.
Occasionally, we will have a negative impact on our ROI based on the work-arounds needed to make SharePoint Designer work for a specific project, but overall there has been more positive impacts than negative.
Provides rapid development - it has helped me create multiple web applications in MVC and Angular within a one-month time frame.
Our clients were facing challenges (taking time to load applications, grid view, and generating reports ) with asp.net web applications. Using Kendo UI we have migrated the ASP.NET application to MVC within a one-month time frame. The client was very happy with the application's performance and responsive UI.
