SharePoint Designer Error "The Server Could Not Complete Your Request"

A very common error when using SharePoint Designer 2007 to open a SharePoint site for editing is the following:

"The server could not complete your request. Contact your internet service provider or Web server administrator to make sure that the server has the Frontpage Server Extensions or SharePoint Services installed."

This error is a real pain and it can be very hard to track down the root cause, this article will give you a work around solutions or two. One of these will hopefully get your site opening up in SharePoint Designer 2007 without any errors or problems.

The first possible solution (with SharePoint 2007 you know there is more than one solution) is to change the settings in your Internet Explorer to prompt for your credentials. When you use designer to open the SharePoint 2007 site over the network it uses the settings from IE to pass your credentials to SharePoint Designer and sometimes the authentication piece isn't working; so you can change it to prompt you for the right username and password. To set IE to prompt you for your credentials follow these steps:

1 - Click Start
2 - Click Control Panel
3 - Click Classic View (Vista and Windows 7 only, XP will be default)
4 - Double-Click Internet Options
5 - Click Security Tab
6 - Click Custom Level Button
7 - Scroll to Bottom of Options
8 - Click Prompt for User name and Password
9 - Click OK
10 - Click OK

Now try to open the site in SharePoint Designer again, if it opens you are done and can get back to work.

If the site still gave you the error then you can try the next possible fix. This time what you are going to do is to authenticate to the site in Internet Explorer first before you try to open the site in SharePoint Designer. This should save your logon credentials in a cookie and then when you open the site in SharePoint Designer hopefully it will use the authentication from that cookie. To do this try to open the URL to your SharePoint 2007 website in Internet Explorer. Afterward try to open the site in SharePoint Designer; if the site opened you are good to go if not there is one last possible fix.

The best solution if you can do it is to install SharePoint Designer 2007 directly on the server that was hosting the SharePoint 2007 website. This should ensure that you are using the proper credentials when trying to open the site in SharePoint Designer.

Well I hope this guide helps to solve the SharePoint Designer Error "The server could not complete your request" for you.