Here's the scenario. Your boss comes to you and says, "Hey, do you know Sharepoint?". You say, "No, not at all. I've used it, but never supported it or installed it." He turns around to a group of people outside of your office and says, "O.K., we will have a Sharepoint server up and running for you in 1 1/2 weeks. Then he walks off to his office and your fellow coworkers start saying, "Hey, I hear you are supposed to have a Sharepoint server done in 1 1/2 weeks." You track down your boss and say, "Hey, what's this about Sharepoint." He says, "Oh yeah, I need you to build them a Sharepoint server and have it ready in 1 1/2 weeks." Your fellow coworkers back you up and try to convince people that it shouldn't be done this way, to no avail. So, now you are stuck building a Sharepoint server with little time to plan and A LOT to learn. This has bad process written all over it, but it happens.
The point of this post is to point out the gotchas I ran into. I am by no means a Sharepoint expert, but after I installed it six times in that 1 1/2 weeks I understand a lot more about it than I started out knowing. My setup included a three servers, the Sharepoint server that hosted the websites and search indexes, the database server, and the email server that just handled email functions. First, go to this site and read up, be sure to download the Visio flow chart, it is great. Here are the things that took me a lot longer to figure out than I wanted them to.
1. You will need to plan, even just if a little bit. If you have limited time to plan I suggest planning your Sharepoint Service accounts and at least the servers you are going to use. Be sure to document this information somewhere. You will need multiple Sharepoint AD accounts created, DO NOT JUST USE YOUR CREDENTIALS. Follow this link for a guide on what accounts to create.
2. If you are using Windows 2008 64bit edition you need to download Sharepoint Services 3.0, MOSS 2007 with the SP slip streamed into it, and Project 2007 if you are going to integrate Project server. These three installs will be ran in the order of Sharepoint 3.0, MOSS 2007, and then Project 2007.
3. If you are using a database server that you have other databases on then anytime Sharepoint says it needs to create a new database, rename new databases as they are created to Sharepoint_xxx, the xxx's being whatever Sharepoint says should be the default name. This makes it much easier to keep track of which databases belong to Sharepoint.
4. When you are creating new Web Applications, name them based on the public URL you plan to use, such as: https://sharepoint.companyname.com, https://mysites.companyname.com, and https://spss.companyname.com. If you do this right and make all users go to the public URL then you will not have to mess with alternate address mappings.
5. Make sure that you do not point Mysites or the Shared Services to your main Sharepoint URL. As in point #4 above, create three separate URLs. If you don't, you will get strange stuff, like your user profiles will be the default landing page. It seems like the right thing to do if you don't know better, I mean it asks for a URL and you just want to tell it the Sharepoint URL. Big mistake here.
6. If you are going to use SSL, and want to redirect http request, visit this link.
7. Just make one site collection for your Sharepoint site to start with. At first I wasn't sure if every department needed a new site collection, so I made them each one. This didn't make sense for my setup, so if you aren't sure, I would say just start with one site collection and then you can have each department have different sites under that collection.
8. Backups: if you want Sharepoint Granular restore functions, which I would totally recommend you are going to probably have to license that feature with whichever backup software you are using. We use Backup Exec and the Sharepoint license was around $1,000
Those were just some of the areas that stumped me. I hope this can help someone down the road. I would appreciate anyone who knows Sharepoint a little better than me commenting and adding your thoughts or corrections to this.
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