To expand my horizons and to increase the knowledge bank of SRT, I decided to dive into SharePoint and find out what it is all about. My first step in the SharePoint world was not actually in SharePoint; I first had to setup a virtual machine to run Windows Server on my machine. SharePoint is a server at heart, and so it needs to run on Windows Server, something I was unaware of when I first undertook the task to learn it. Setting up the virtual machine on my computer was a small adventure in itself. I installed Virtual PC, mostly because we had the disk lying around and I have a license through my MSDN subscription. The first thing I found was that there was no default setup for a Server 2008 virtual machine, so I used the Vista defaults. After having some performance issues, I would suggest increasing the RAM to 1gig to run Server 2008 well. The 512MB default seems to be a low target. Another bit of wisdom would be to name your server something reasonable right away, instead of putting it off until later. Also, it seems pretty important to install the Virtual PC additions on your virtual machine, because they make the experience significantly more enjoyable (a jittery mouse is one of the banes of my existence.)
After getting Server 2008 installed, I immediately installed the SharePoint server. This was a mistake, as I noted above, because I didn’t change the name of my virtual machine, which left it with a very nasty name that I can’t remember. This is a mistake because the server sets up a few websites when it is installed, with the path as <computer name>:<port number>. Granted, using localhost:<port number> is a work around, but I would still suggest using a usable server name. These can be seen in the Internet Information Services (IIS) manager; you had to install this before SharePoint would install. After installing SharePoint you can open the Administration page (which conveniently is in the start menu, because it doesn’t host on a standard port for each install.) Looking at this page is a bit daunting, as there is a lot going on. SharePoint turns out to be a huge package, with a lot of possibilities. Even with this sensory overload of information, it is pretty easy to get a new site up and running.
To create a new site, all you need to do is go to Application Management (the link is on the left side of the screen, under Central Administration.) In Application Management there is a link for “Create or Extend a web application.” SharePoint’s websites are all web applications. When you create a new one you a given a lot of configuration that you can play with. The user name for the Application pool, as I understand it, is a user on the server. On the next page you are able to setup what kind of website you want. There is a wide array of websites that SharePoint can create for you. I got a simple wiki up and running in just a few minutes.
Because of the incredible amount of customization that SharePoint browser offers, it is suggested that you start your website development in the browser. If the browser doesn’t allow you to do something that you need, the next step is to move into the SharePoint Designer. The Designer is what FrontPage has become. The last thing you do when making SharePoint pages is dive into the code. All SharePoint pages are stored in one location, and any changes made to them are stored in the SharePoint database. The site’s pages can be accessed from Site Actions->Settings->Master Pages. I’ll get into editing pages and sites more in later posts.
The shows at dnrTV on SharePoint with Sahil Malik are really good, and held my hand throughout this process. The first one can be found at: http://www.dnrtv.com/default.aspx?showNum=43.
