How to install SharePoint 2010 on Windows 7

For those of you interested in running the SharePoint 2010 Beta 2 on your home computers, or have a Windows 7 workstation and want to get SharePoint up and running, there are a few small pit-falls that you need to be aware of!


Note - all of these tips are covered in the great MSDN article which explains these steps in detail.

64 Bit

the really obvious one is that SharePoint 2010 is 64-bit only, so you need to have Windows 7 x64 edition installed!

Pre-requisites

The second kicker is that you will have to install the pre-requisites manually! the auto-installer for Server 2008 simply doesn't work on Windows 7.

One of the easiest ways to achieve most of these is to install the Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2. This sets up many of the pre-requisites, including .Net Framework 4 and Silverlight :)

Some of the other steps (such as making sure you have IIS and SQL installed) you will have to do manually though.

Note - The MSDN article contains detailed information on which pre-requisites you need to install, and how to do it!

Installing SharePoint 2010

Ok .. the first thing you will notice is that the installer won't actually let you install it. You will get an error message warning you that you actually need to be running Windows Server 2008. (Fear not .. you haven't got the wrong download!)

There are 2 easy steps to get it all working:

1) Open a command prompt, and run the installer with the /Extract argument. This will extract the files from the installer to a specified directory. For example:

OfficeServer.exe /extract:c:\OfficeServer

2) Once the files have extracted, go to the "..\Files\Setup\config.xml" and open this file for editing (e.g. C:\OfficeServer\Files\Setup\config.xml)

You need to add in a line in the tag, just before the Configuration tag:

<Setting Id="AllowWindowsClientInstall" Value="True" />

Now you can run the Setup.exe from the extracted folder (e.g. C:\OfficeServer\setup.exe), and installation of SharePoint 2010 begins!

cheers!

Martin

Epic Fail - Saving to a document library overwrites AllItems.aspx

This was a major "doh" moment .. learnt the hard way.

I don't know if this is because I'm using Word 2010 beta, but I was working on a document that I wanted to save into a SharePoint library.

So I copy pasted the URL into the "Save As" dialog (including the ".../Forms/AllItems.aspx" bit on the end).

I expected it to show me a view of my library.

I got a Word Document saved as "AllItems.aspx".

Epic Fail! :)

IIS7 broke my Content Deployment! (404 - Not Found error)

Important one to bear in mind this, especially as SharePoint 2010 is likely to have the same limitation (IIS7!)


Content Deployment works by creating exports of the Site Collection data, and splitting it up into CAB files with a default size of 10MB. These are then shipped off to the target Central Admin Application (using a Layouts page called DeploymentUpload.aspx). Once all the CAB files have been received they are imported into the database of the target site collection.

All very simple, but what do you do when your Content Deployment job starts throwing errors like "404 - Not Found"?? (note - Content Deployment errors end up in the Windows Application Logs).

Well, the first place to look would be your IIS logs for your Central Administration application (which for IIS7 are located in the C:\inetpub folder). Look for a reference to "DeploymentUpload.aspx" with a 404 error reference.. which I have an example of below:

2010-02-02 10:16:29 ::1 POST /_admin/Content+Deployment/DeploymentUpload.aspx filename=%22ExportedFiles18.cab%22&remoteJobId=%22b8a556bc-8eef-4f6f-97b6-6bac54ae8d99%22 40197 - ::1 - 404 13 0 78

Now, I have highlighted the error fragment which states that this is a 404.13 error (or Content Length Too Large)! The reason for this is that one of the CAB files is too big, and IIS7 has a file upload limit of about 27MB!

Now, the quick witted among you will remember I said that the CAB files automatically split up into 10MB chunks .. but if MOSS comes across a file that is too big it will simply expand the file size until it can fit that file in!! In the case of a project I'm working on this lead to a 68mb CAB file!

The only workaround is to configure the IIS7 Virtual Directory for Central Administration to allow file uploads big enough for my CAB file to get through (in my case, I set it to 80,000,000 bytes, approx 75MB).

To do this, open up a command prompt, navigate to C:\Windows\System32\Inetsrv\ and execute the following command:

appcmd set config "SharePoint Central Administration v3" -section:system.webserver/security/requestFiltering -requestLimits.MaxAllowedContentLength:80000000

Restarted the Content Deployment job and all good .. working again :) So something to bear in mind ... why IIS7 can break your Content Deployment Jobs!!