What is SharePoint

 

I was reading few Articles from SharePoint Expert's and I am still trying to get to somewhat near to that level where I can be called as SharePoint Expert. Many Times I get inspired from such Experts to write an article. I was reading few article and really this question comes to my mind straight away. Here I am trying to put some of my thoughts on SharePoint.

I would say SharePoint is a Platform or a Framework which you can use the way you need to or even use it in multiple way once configured properly. but here are few options for SharePoint's usage few of them Requires some additional servers to complete the role but I would still say SharePoint can be molded for that role.

• Internet Portal
• Enterprise Search Portal
• Collaboration Tool
• Business Intelligence tool
• Forms Server
• Extranet Tool
• Enterprise Content Management Tool
• Web Content Management Tool
• Enterprise Project Management Tool
• Business Process Management Tool
• Document Management Tool
• Unified Messaging Gateway
• E-Commerce Application

and many more roles can be added and we will see those being added to the list. I have seen few people who believes that SharePoint is just a ECM tool and you can not do anything else but ECM with SharePoint and I just ignore their thoughts as I know that they are the people who never understood SharePoint properly.

I would say SharePoint is a business productivity platform.  You simply need to understand what needs to be done so that you can implement that way.

Installing MOSS 2007 on Server 2008 & SQL 2008

Since Last 3 Days I was trying to install MOSS 2007 on Server 2008. for testing purpose I selected to Use Microsoft Virtual PC and tried to Create new Virtual PC on my laptop which is running Vista Business.

I Created new Virtual PC and Installed Server 2008 Standard Edition over there. Second Step After Server Installation was to Install IIS on the server so I proceeded & Installed IIS over there. Third Step was to install SQL 2008 I installed current CTP version of SQL 2008. Till SQL installation everything went perfect and as expected and I thought that now it will be smooth ride for me to install SharePoint 2007 as I have done many installations of SharePoint 2007 during last few months. but I was proved wrong immediately the moment I clicked setup from my MOSS install files. What I get was following Screens.

It was asking for installation with SP1 and I knew that there is no Installation with SP1 Available. still I went to Microsoft.com and tried my luck but search result was as expected I got Separate SP1 Installation Package and MOSS installation after that I was discussing this issue with few of my friends and We found an option while Discussing and the option was to try to Extract SP1 files both WSS3.0 SP1 & Office Servers Pack SP1 to \updates folder of MOSS installation files. and then try to Install on Server 2008. It worked like anything so I decided to write this article on my live space so that my other friends gets benefited.

After Installation using SQL 2008 instead of SQL 2005 was nothing different it was all same and I was able to do that without any issues.

I hope that Microsoft will come up with MOSS installation with SP1 soon so that people don't need to do manual extraction of .exe and merge them with MOSS install files but till then You have to use the method to extract the install files. If you have ISO image of SP1 then you might not need to Extract the files from exe as ISO image contains all the files in Extracted mode only.

 

Hope this information Helps....

Hiran Salvi

Gradual Upgrade - SharePoint 2003 to Moss 2007 takes a lot of disk space

I have completed few upgrades during last year from SharePoint 2003 to MOSS 2007 and those who know SharePoint will always agree on doing upgrade using Gradual Upgrade as primary choice as it is the most safe method for executing upgrade but on the other side this method consumes lots of Disk Space on SQL Server when the upgrade is running. There is no proper documentation which guides us on this. I am stating even though there is documentation on technet itself about this that this requires about 2 to 2.5 times of the size you are upgrading but never ever in my up gradation projects I was ever near to this thing I had found SQL server using much more space then mentioned on Technet. I have always found about 6-7 times of Space being utilized by SQL Server while upgrade is running and once upgrade is done completely then the temp db gets deleted automatically so space gets freed up but one needs to have provision for the space when you start upgrade.

Hope this helps...

Hiran Salvi