Recently we have stood up a new SharePoint 2013 environment with three regions (development, quality assurance and production). We have a SharePoint 2007 environment that was never governed and became out of control that we are migrating from. One of the new governance decisions we have decided upon are restricting the use of SharePoint Designer to just the development region and then promoting those changes through to quality assurance and eventually production utilizing a tool we purchanges from AvePoint to deploy those changes.
As we are getting ready to start migrating sites over, I have noticed most of our sites require more than just the OOB workflows but instead require most customizations to their workflows utilizing SharePoint Designer. This I am seeing is going to cause a lot of administrative overhead with trying to keep up with all the requests for changes to be synced on a constant basis through the environments up to production.
So this brings me to the question, are there any cons about allowing SharePoint Designer in the production environment? Is there anything a user can do within SPD that can cause issues not just on their site but with SharePoint in general? In the end I am not so worried about if they mess up their own site as they are responsible for their own site, but I want to avoid what they do in SPD causing issues with everyone else as well. For example, can they produce an infinite loop by accident with SPD eventually affecting the server performance with memory and CPU utilization?
Thanks
Ron Montecalvo