Sharepoint 2007

Last week I was asked to install Sharepoint portal server 2007 onto a windows 2003 server. I've used sharepoint many years ago and figured that the installation would not be too difficult so I downloaded the ISO file from technet and fired the installation up to be hit with a message that I was missing a whole list of pre-requisties. This was the start of roughly four days of fun and games getting Sharepoint working.

To install Sharepoint you need to have the following installed:

ASP.Net 2.0
.Net Framework 3.0
NTFS formatted file system
IIS

I assume that most people will read this will know how to install the above items, anyone new or new-ish to Windows may have some problems especially as things like .Net Framework requires a trawl through Microsoft's site - Why this couldn't be included on the installation CD remains a mystery.

Once the pre-requisites were in place the installation was fairly simple and uses the new 'single button' installation in Microsoft office. When the installation is complete a configuration wizard launches that goes through 10 configuration steps - All of which are hands off and once done your Sharepoint server should be up and running.

The one thing that tripped me up was a slightly over-zealous blocking policy on McAfee. This was causing a couple of nasty browser error messages. It took a while to figure out that something in McAfee didn't like that sharepoint was dynamically creating a file called webresource.axd and then executing it. The result was that most buttons in sharepoint didn't work and several javascript error messages stating "library not regsistered" or "webform_postbackoptions is undefined". A red herring was several dozen DCOM error messages in the registery where NETWORK SERVICE is not granted access to a DCOM object. It seems that even with this security restriction it still all works.

Make no mistake that even once installed it's not just a matter of clicking and using, There is still a fair amount of work that needs to be done to get the best out of it as a system. Right now I have only got the basics up and running but I'm planning on looking at the intergration between sharepoint and Office with the goal of being able to save an office document directly into sharepoint.