1. Adding Forgotten Patches
As great as the prerequisite installer
is, ensure that you install any appropriate additional patches,
depending on your OS. Hopefully, in the near future such patches will
be rolled out as Windows Updates, but currently you need to handle this
yourself.
Windows Server 2008 R2
If you are using Windows Server 2008
R2, not Windows Server 2012, you need to manually request, register,
download, and install the following patches:
- KB 2554876 at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkId=254221
- KB 2708075 at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkID=254222
- KB 2759112 at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkId=267536
Windows Server 2012
For those of you using Windows Server 2012, Microsoft didn’t leave you out of the fun:
- KB 2765317 at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkID=268725
2. Running Setup
Now that your environment is primed and ready to go, you can use the following steps to install SharePoint:
1. Remote
desktop into the SharePoint server as your install account —
Contoso\sp_install for this example. See the earlier section,
“Preparing the Environment,” if you need a reminder about what
permissions this account needs.
2. From the folder in which the SharePoint files are mounted, run setup.exe.
3. At this
point, SharePoint will confirm you have installed all the prerequisites
and that there are no pending reboots. If you get any setup error
message here, then you need to either reboot or note which prerequisite
you did not install. Assuming you did everything correctly, you will
see the Enter your Product Key dialog. Enter your key and click
Continue. Remember that if you use the trial key, it is valid for 180
days only. Also, if you are having a hard time finding the trial key,
it is located at the bottom of the page on which you started the
process of downloading the trial version, in a very light font.
4. Read the license terms (don’t you always?), select “I accept the terms of this agreement,” and click Continue.
5. Stop! When people screw up installs, this is where it happens most frequently. When the dialog shown in Figure 1
appears, choose Complete! If you choose Stand-alone, then SharePoint
will automatically install SQL Express on this machine and configure
everything with a bunch of crazy defaults. Don’t do it.
After choosing Complete, click Install
Now. If you want to change the default file locations you can, but note
that this doesn’t install all of the SharePoint files to that new
location. You will still have the files in the c:\program files\common files\Microsoft shared\web server extensions\ folder
no matter what. You
need at least 100GB of space for your C: drive. Even if you accept the
default for the Search files location when you configure the search
service application, you can still specify the location of those Search
files.
6. When setup
finishes, the Run Configuration Wizard window will appear. SharePoint
is offering to kick off the wizard to help you create or join a farm.
Say, “No thank you!” by deselecting “Run the SharePoint Products
Configuration Wizard now.” Then click Close.
You don’t want to run the configuration
wizard because it is recommended that you do some of the initial
configuration steps using PowerShell in order to avoid having the
Central Administration content database created with a GUID in its name.
3. Automating Setup
If the preceding steps seem too
complicated or you build so many SharePoint farms that you would like
to automate that process, SharePoint provides that capability through
the use of a config.xml file. If
you look in the folder where you mounted the SharePoint install files,
you will see a folder called files. This folder contains several other
folders, each of which contains a different config.xml
preconfigured to its scenario; and because it is just an XML file you
can make changes as necessary.
