Share Point Foundation 2010 Installation

Feasible server?

Update 2015-10-29

SharePoint universe has changed considerably since June 2010 when this page was first published. For a good entry into todays SP Universe please go to here :

No More SharePoint Designer & No More SharePoint Foundation in SharePoint 2016

 

2010-06-28 Original Page

I think text bellow is still valid for people who are tasked with migrating content from previous version of  SharePoint to the latest SharePoint version.

How to stay safe and normal, while installing SharePoint Foundation 2010 and SharePoint Designer 2010

DBJ SPF 2010 Installed and ready

Abbreviations that are used in a text bellow: SharePoint 2010 Foundation:  SPF or SPF2010 or WSS 4.0 or WSS.

This is a great way to learn to work with the SharePoint 2010 platform. Just download SharePoint Foundation 2010 – if you would follow the logic of naming from the previous versions, this would have been Windows SharePoint Services 4.0 – together with SharePoint Designer 2010. These tools do not have any additional license cost. So why not “just” try them out?

Well perhaps because one can easily “go off his trolley” trying to do “just” that. Because I am very strong and capable :) , I have managed to install SPF2010 on W7x64. And also because I am benevolent I will share my wisdom with you ;)

Let’s begin

In the (very likely) case Your development machine is Win7 x64 please “jump” first to this page:Setting Up the Development Environment for SharePoint 2010 on Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Windows Server 2008

IMPORTANT: Save yourself (a lot of grief) and read this note.

The location of the config.xml, which is crucial file to be edited, is not clearly explained.

If you have unpacked the SPF setup in (for example) E:\SharePointFiles, then you DO NOT, edit

E:\SharePointFiles\Files\Setup\config.xml

Instead you DO first start E:\SharePointFiles\SharePointFoundation.exe /extract …. , as explained in the page whose link is above

Then you DO edit the setup config file which You will find here :
“C:\Program Files (x86)\MSECache\SharePoint2010\Files\Setup\config.xml”

This is the first of the two extremely important omissions from the published manual, second is this:

Your SPF2010 setup will try silently to setup SQL Server 2008 Express

SQL Server 2008 Express CAN NOT be installed in compressed NTFS folders.

If you have accidentally and innocently hit this “land mine” your SPF2010 installation will keep on failing unexplicably until you do not make sure these folders are decompressed on your NTFS C: drive

  1. C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server
  2. C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared
  3. C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\microsoft shared
  4. C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SQL Server

Right now, this is not mentioned ANYWHERE on-line and associated with SPF2010, at least not on any MSFT maintained sites, available publicly, that I could find.

Please be aware. SPF2010 Setup will not inform you about any of these problems explicitly and clearly

It will just refuse to install with some high level irrelevant error message about ‘Office Components’, or some such message. And then You will have to dive in the sea of log files, generated in : C:\Users\admin\AppData\Local\Temp , or wherever your %TEMP% is pointing to. Alternatively You can first do what I advise you here to do.

At last here is the link to the SharePoint Foundation 2010

SharePoint 2010 Designer Installation Issues

Please read this too before attempting to install SP Designer on your W7x64 machine.

In case you are reading this, you are in trouble and you “googled out” this text.  This is very likely due to the fact your machine is Win7x64 AND you DO NOT have Office 2010 64 bit installed. You have installed 32 bit Office, as dutifully advised by Microsoft.

Unfortunately nobody has informed you this: If you do want to install SP Designer 64 bit, you can not have 32 bit Office (any version) on the same machine. If you try you will be greeted with the dialogue very similar to this one:

SP_Designer64bit_minefield
SP Designer64bit minefield

Yet another detail, MVP’s forgot to mention, on all their helpful forums. Of course someone who was overseeing (if anyone was) this installation nightmare in development, probably knew you are by now too tired to ask: WTF this message looks like someone is installing Office 2010 ?!

Still the ordeal is likely not over  for you, in the likely case there is Office 2003 on this Win7x64 machine, you use or was given to you to install SPF. Which 50% of us still does, I am afraid.

So. The next ridiculous hurdle is that SP Designer setup (32 bit) is going to start and immediately stop with the following error:

SP_Designer_minefield
SP_Designer_minefield

At this point You have to either remove all Office 2003 bits from your machine or do as this dialogue orders.
Please proceed:

This way for SharePoint Designer 2010 (32-bit) download.

Or this way for SharePoint Designer 2010 (64-bit) the 64 bit version – Note: This is the 64-bit version of SharePoint Designer. SharePoint Designer 2010 only connects to SharePoint 2010. To connect to SharePoint 2007 and earlier sites you must continue to use SharePoint Designer 2007. If you elect to install both applications side-by-side, you must download the 32-bit version of SharePoint Designer 2010, and install it after installing SharePoint Designer 2007. Please also note that 64 bit Office applications will not run if SharePoint Designer 2007 is installed; 64-bit Office 2010 applications should only be used if not connecting to SharePoint 2007 servers.

SharePoint Search Server

If there ever was a “beast” among Microsoft server side products this is it. But. Incredibly there is “express” version of it which does not require server farms, NAS or SAN with no less than 10K IOPS and so on.

Search Server 2010 Express -If you’re using SharePoint Foundation, you can easily add search capabilities to your collaboration environment across SharePoint sites, file shares, web sites, Exchange Public Folders, and third party repositories using Microsoft Search Server 2010 Express