Installing SharePoint 2010 Beta 1

Update: If you want a free 35 page eBook, covering amongst other, installing the public Beta of SharePoint 2010, just head over to the Introducing SharePoint 2010 website and download the free first issue.

I’ve been talking to a lot of the beta testers of SharePoint 2010 and one thing seems to be common; getting SharePoint 2010 beta 1 installed is damn hard.

A couple of weeks ago, someone posted a quick overview of the prerequisites up until the installation was running, but apparently, that didn’t fall well with the NDA people at Microsoft so the post was removed. Of course, that means that those who need help and Google for that help wont find anything.

Anyway, I thought I’d post it here now, so that in case you do need help with installing the SharePoint 2010 beta you can at least get some help.

Prerequisites

You will need Windows 2008 and you will need it in the 64 bit flavor. I’m doing my current work on a trial Windows 2008 R2 virtual machine.

You can also save yourself some time and download the beta 1 of the Geneva framework. The Geneva framework is a new framework for authenticating users using claims-based authentication, and it's required for SharePoint 2010, both WSS4 and SS2010.

Note that you must have beta 1. Beta 2 will not work. Repeat: Get Geneva beta 1. Sadly, Microsoft seems to have removed beta 1 from their web pages, so you’ll need to Google or get your copy from somewhere else.

If you install Geneva beta 2, your installation may start, but your configuration wizard will crash at step 3 since it is trying to get the wrong version of Geneva. You’ll get one of those nice ‘Everything crashed’ messages that takes forever to debug. However, walk through the setup log and you’ll get some pointers that the version of Geneva is wrong.

You’ll also need to install a 64 bit SQL Server, but either 2005 or 2008 will do. You might as well start installing that right away; you’ll want it prior to starting the installation of SharePoint 2010 and you _must_ have it prior to running the configuration wizard.

Roles and Features

SharePoint 2010 requires some roles and features enabled. Specifically. you must add the Web Server (IIS) role, and you might as well do this first. You’ll want to add the ASP.NET role service, which will force a few other services as well. In addition, you’ll want to have the IIS 6.0 manageability services enabled and also the Windows Authentication service.

If you do not enable the Windows Authentication service, your web sites will not work and only show up blank.

Below is my web server role services prior to hitting Install. Click the image to get, well, the big picture…

You will also want to enable the .NET 3.5.1 feature, and the Geneva installation will remind you of this.

Installation

The easiest way, by the way, to figure out which components you need to install and configure, is to hit the Install Office SharePoint Server option on the Start screen of the installation.

In SharePoint 2010 you get the more user-friendly option of having an ‘Install software prerequisites’ just like you have in Search Server 2008, however, this option has never worked for me, and I never get the setup I need. So, start the installation by hitting Install Office SharePoint Server instead, and if you haven’t set up everything, setup will fail and tell you exactly what you need to install or enable first.

Once you have everything set up correctly, the installation runs as smooth as anything.

Finally, once installation completes, you can run the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard as you would, and set up your farm. This runs pretty much as it did in SharePoint 2007 with the noted addition of the farm password, of course.

After the 11 steps are completed, hit Finish and you’ll see the pretty face of Central Administration and the new Initial Farm Configuration Wizard.

I’ll talk more about that wizard later :-)

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