What You Need to Run SharePoint

This section provides general information about what you need to install and run SharePoint, both WSS and MOSS. It also has general guidelines on the hardware configuration and some tips for building a test environment. Chapter 2 provides the exact steps on how to do the actual installation of a WSS 3.0 only environment. Chapter 4 provides the installation steps for a MOSS 2007 environment.

Software Requirements

Because SharePoint is a web application, you need to have a web server. The only web server that supports SharePoint is Internet Information Server version 6 (and later versions), which runs on Windows 2003 Server and later generations of Windows Server. You can use any edition of Windows 2003 Server, including the cheaper Web Edition.

You need to install the Windows component ASP.NET web platform, as described in Chapter 2, plus upgrade it to support ASP.NET 2.0, including Windows Workflow Foundation (Win WF). If you want SharePoint to act as a mail server, thus allowing users to send mail to its lists, you must also install the Windows component SMTP. All of this is covered in detail in Chapters 2 and 4.

The last, but not least, component you need is an MS SQL–based database. You have two choices: Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express, which comes free with SharePoint 2007 or the full MS SQL 2000/2005 Server. These two choices give you different features, as listed in the following table:

Open table as spreadsheet

Feature	SQL Server Express	MS SQL 2000/2005
Limited database size	Yes (4 GB max - but see comment in the text below)	No
Can run on a separate server	No	Yes
Includes management tools	No	Yes
License type	Free	Per CPU or per user

However, the story is a bit more complicated than this! If you install a pure WSS 3.0 environment, you will have a special version of SQL Server Express referred to as the Embedded SQL Server Express. This version does not have any size limitations, which means that you can run WSS 3.0 using this embedded database edition in a production environment - and both of these are free when running on Windows 2003 Server! But if you install MOSS, you get the 4 GB size-limited version of SQL Server Express. This means that you cannot use MOSS with SQL Server Express in a production environment due to the limitation; rather, you must use the MS SQL 2000/2005 Server.

There is one more important difference regarding SQL Server Express and SQL 2000/2005 Server: The former must be installed on the same server as SharePoint (WSS or MOSS), while MS SQL 2000/2005 gives you an option of choosing what server to use for storing all the data. Only by using the full SQL 2000/2005 Server can you keep SharePoint and the database on separate servers, which provides improved performance and scalability. This is known in SharePoint terms as a small server farm configuration.

Hardware Requirements

In addition to all the software requirements, the server hardware must also be configured properly. For a test environment, you can get by with 1 GB of memory and at least 10 GB of free disk space. This type of requirement is easily met by using virtual server software, such as MS Virtual PC. The CPU type is not important in a test environment, but in a production environment you will want a high-speed single or multiple-CPU configuration. You learn more about this in Chapters 2 and 4.

Building a Test Environment

Using a virtual server, such as MS Virtual PC, makes it possible to build and test SharePoint on your ordinary MS Windows XP client. It also makes it possible to test and play with different configurations and scenarios. And if (or, more likely, when) things go wrong, you can simply use the undo feature of MS Virtual PC. Another nice option with virtual servers is to make a copy of the virtual server environment and, if necessary, restore that copy in the event that your test environment becomes messed up beyond repair!

I recommend that you use a virtual server for testing everything detailed in this book. It will make it much easier for you in case something goes wrong, and you won't have to worry about testing and playing around. Once you know how SharePoint works, you can then go on to use your own production environment.