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