Good instructions are rare, but they do exist
I took the plunge and installed SharePoint 2007 on my home PC last night.
As my home operating system is Vista, I installed a virtual PC first. (Easy enough to install, using the instructions from Microsoft.) After this I installed Windows Server 2003, then SQL Server 2005 and finally, MOSS 2007 on top of that.
It wasn’t too hard, although it took all day. I had two sets of instructions to follow. I used SharePoint Reporter’s How to create a MOSS 2007 Virtual PC: The Whole Nine Yards, with Eli Robillard’s How to Build a SharePoint Development Machine as a reference, particularly for some of the Virtual PC settings. (Robillard used a different virtual PC, which is why I didn’t use his instructions, but they were both similar.)
The instructions were a dream to use. They told me exactly what I needed to do, and when. They were everything good documentation should be.
Although I had never installed Windows Server or SQL Server before, I had not trouble setting it up. There was enough information to carry out each task, but there was no unnecessary clutter in them either.
Everything was exactly where I needed it, when I needed it.
I ran into difficulties right at the end, after MOSS 2007 had been loaded, but I suspect that had more to do with the fact that I went out to dinner with friends part way through installing SharePoint and tried to finish the install four hours later, after a civilised amount of wine had been consumed. Still, I was on familiar territory then, so I ditched the instruction and winged it.
I started at 10:00 am, and finished at midnight. None of that time was spent troubleshooting, it was all spent following instructions and waiting for installs—and dinner, of course.
That’s a pretty impressive piece of documentation.
Comments (2 comments)
Thanks for the post and links. I was thinking of installing SharePoint 2007 on my computer last week but I wasn’t quite sure how to do it, or if I would have the time. It’s nice to know it only took a day. Is SP 2007 resource intensive? When you created the virtual PC, did it perform too slow to be useful?
Tom Johnson / September 15th, 2007, 2:29 pm / #
Tom
It’s resource intensive and quite slow. I’m using 1.5Gb of memory for the vitual machine, and a very fast PC.
The virtual machine takes time to load and some of the MOSS admin functions are extremely slow.
Using Moss itself … for most basic things to do with libraries and lists it is slower than your average LAN, but not so screamingly slow that that it’s not useable.
CabSav / September 15th, 2007, 3:54 pm / #
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