posted on Saturday, July 29, 2006 10:59 AM
by
jritmeijer
SharePoint Services - Getting Started
Anyone who regularly reads this blog has probably noticed that I have recently been posting a lot of 'Getting Started' articles;
WPF,
Biztalk and now SharePoint. The reason for this is that I have accepted a new position with a company in the financial industry in London, which requires me to brush up on some technologies.
Today's posting is about Microsoft SharePoint Services, the foundation for the other SharePoint products... I think. Actually I am reasonably sure, but in my opinion Microsoft is not doing the best job in explaining this product to the development community. Nevertheless, enterprises are starting to implement SharePoint at quite a large scale if I need to believe the number of job openings for SharePoint Developers.
A full explanation of SharePoint is out of the scope of this posting, in stead I will focus on installing the core SharePoint Services and linking to one or two resources to get started.
The next step is to
download the free SharePoint Services with integrated SP2 and read the readme file. The previously mentioned Admin Guide, you did read it right, explains that you can either perform a default installation that installs WMSDE or perform a custom install and use SQL 2000. Having read the Admin Guide I decided to perform a custom install as it is not possible to administer WMSDE remotely, not even using the standard MSDE tricks. If you don't care about remote SQL Administration then I strongly recommend to perform a default installation as that is extremely simple.
After installation, the admin website did not work for me. I got several errors including '401 2148074254' indicating a security problem. I disabled Windows Integrated Authentication for the site in IIS and enabled Basic Authentication. This solved the problem well enough for a development system, but if this happens on a production server I would recommend a more structural solution.
One final problem I ran into was related to the custom installation I performed. When manually generating a Virtual Server and application pool I got a '1057' error, something about 'SPTimer'. The solution was to use a fully qualified user name \userName.
Once setup is completed you can either go to the administrator pages using 'Start / Administrative Tools / SharePoint Central Administration' or navigate to the SharePoint site you just set up.
That is all for now. I will discuss creating SharePoint Web Parts in a next posting.