Sharepoint Designer

So, I’ve successfully installed MOSS 2007 on our development server. The installation has one web application (I kept the default) with two sites underneath:

• Technology – this is a team site for the development/IT team to collaborate. We will create one of these for each department.
• Executive – I want to use this as a place for executives to store sensitive files and collaborate. I removed this from the navigation by marking it as hidden. (Site Actions -> Site Settings -> Modify navigation -> Select a nav item and choose ‘hide’)

I would like to now give our Designer access to the installation to make it look good and give it some clean Archer Group branding. According to the SharePoint Bible the best way to do this is by using the new SharePoint Designer. I downloaded a 60 day trial.

I installed the trial and I’m going through the tutorial in Sharepoint Bible “Using Sharepoint Designer” chapter. I’ve granted my user “Owner” rights to the Home site (top level). I was attempting to save a new default master page and received the following error when saving: “Server Error: Access Denied”… very verbose… After some googling it seems granting your user full control in Web Application Policies fixes the issue. However, I’m not sure I’ll want to grant all of the designers this level of access so I am going to investigate why this is happening. FYI the way to change this policy is:

Central Administration -> Application Management -> Policy for web application (Make sure you have the correct web app specified).