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 . 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.

McAfee