Both SharePoint Services and MOSS 2007 can be installed in a variety of ways, but in this walkthrough I will concentrate on the basic single server installation using SQL Express 2005. In later articles I will cover some of the other configurations you can use.

Pre-Requisites

The basic requirements for an installation of WSS 3.0 are as follows:

Windows Server 2003 SP1
IIS Server
.NET Framework 3.0

For more information please see the following TechNet article http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/cc288751.aspx

Getting Started

Ok, I want to install WSS 3.0, on my nice clean Windows 2003 server, what do I need to do. Well there are a couple of things that I need to do before I start to install WSS. The first thing is to ensure that IIS is installed, on the server I am using for this walkthrough it isn’t. So I will need to install it. If it is already installed you can skip this part and go to the configuration of IIS section.

Install IIS (Internet Information Services)

So to install IIS, I can either go to Control Panel --> Add/Remove Programs --> Add/Remove Components --> Application Server and select Internet Information Services (See Figure 1.) or I can use the configure my server tool and select the application server option (see Figure 1.1), either option you choose will result in the installation being processed.

During the installation process, you may be asked for your installation disc, just enter the location in the dialog box and continue.

Once the installation wizard has completed you should have IIS Installed, we now need to configure this for use with SharePoint Services.

Configuring IIS for WSS 3.0

There are two areas that we need to be aware of when configuring IIS for WSS 3.0, the first is that by default asp.net v2.0 pages are blocked by default and even though the .net Framework 2 and 3 may be installed they might not be configured for use with IIS.

The first thing to do is open Internet Information Services and see if ASP.Net pages are allowed and if IIS is configured to use ASP.NET V2 pages. Go to Control Panel --> Administrative Tools --> Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager. The IIS manager screen should now open navigate to the web service extensions folder to open the configured extensions. If this looks similar to figure 2.1 i.e. with ASP.Net V2 set to allowed, then your IIS server is configured correctly, if it is not then we have to configure IIS for the .NET Framework 2.0.

If ASP.NET V2 is shown in he above list, but is set to prohibited then click on the allow button. If however ASP.NET V2 is not shown you will need to configure IIS for the .NET Framework V2, by registering the framework.

If the framework is already installed then open a cmd prompt and navigate to the following folder c:\windows\microsoft.net\Framework\v2.0.50727\ and run aspnet_regiis –I (see figure 1.2), this will install the .NET framework on your IIS server.

If the framework is not installed you can download it from here http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=0856EACB-4362-4B0D-8EDD-AAB15C5E04F5&displaylang=en

Once this has been installed you still may need to run the above process against your IIS server.  The only other thing to note here is that FrontPage Extensions should not be installed on a server running WSS 3.0, so if possible remove this from your IIS server.

Configuring User Accounts

For a single server installation this step is not necessary, but it does not do any harm and sets a good precedent if you install WSS or MOSS on multiple servers in the future.

I always set up at least 2 accounts for WSS one for the administration purposes (i.e. data access, searching etc…) account and one for the IIS worker process or application pool. 

This is useful to do now, as when WSS is installed in default mode you will receive a message in the central administration task list informing you that the application service account should be unique. I would always set these to local accounts, just so that if the server is compromised the accounts used here will be of no use on the domain.

Generally what I do is to setup two local user accounts in this instance WSSAdmin and WSSService. These can be added to the local administrators group and assigned the log on as a service role in the local security policy settings. See Figures 3.1 and 3.2.  

New users can be created using the Administrative Tools --> Computer Management --> Local Users and Groups, whilst the logon as a service setting is applied in the local security policy settings, which is accessed via Administrative Tools --> Local Security Policy --> User Rights Assignments à Logon as a service.

Figure 3.1 Creating a User for the WSS service account

Figure 3.2 Giving the created user log on as service rights

Once these steps have been completed we can start to install Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

Installing Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (WSS 3.0)

To install WSS download the installation file from the Microsoft website (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=4191A531-A2E9-45E4-B71E-5B0B17108BD2&displaylang=en) and save this to a location on your server.

Once this has downloaded double click on the exe file and the installation process should now start. At this point the installation process should warn you if any of the pre-requisite steps have not been completed, but if the process outlined here has been followed you should not have any problems.  

After a few minutes the licensing screen (see figure 4.1) should appear, select the I accept the terms of the agreement check box and click on continue to proceed with the installation.

The next screen which should appear is the choose installation options screen (see figure 4.2). On this screen you have two options Basic and Advanced. For this example I will select the basic installation option.  The advanced option lets us select different installation options including server farm installations, which are not covered in this article. However, it is important to note that selecting the basic option will install SQL Express, which has some limitations, such as the 4GB database size limit.  Choosing the basic option also installs everything in the c:\Program Files directory.  This may cause problems if that drive has a small partition or the server becomes compromised.  So best practise would be to install SharePoint and SQL on a seperate partition, but for this walkthrough I will use the default installation choices.

Click on basic to continue. After 10-20 minutes or so (dependant on the speed of your server), the basic installation should have completed and you should see the screen shown in Figure 4.3. Once this screen appears select the Run the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard Now check box and the setup process will attempt to configure the standalone version of SharePoint Services.

This step can take some time and goes through approximately ten steps, none of which on the basic installatioj require you to do anything, if you are running the advanced setup you will be asked for information such as database server, account details etc...

At some stage during this wizard you should get a message saying that a number of services are about to be stopped, do not worry about this, unless you are running other web based applications on this server, if so then be aware that during the configuration process these services will not be available.

As long as there are no errors this process should complete and show the configuration complete screen (see figure 4.4). Congratulations we have now successfully installed and partially configured a standalone single server instance of SharePoint Services.

To finish the installation and initial configuration of SharePoint Services just click the finish button of the configuration successful screen, and a Internet Explorer window should now appear and eventually our default team site should show up (see figure 4.5).

Final Configuration Steps

Now we could finish here and start setting up our new site, but there are a couple of things that we can do before we start creating content. One of the first things that I always do is to assign my application pool to one of the accounts that I set up earlier. You can do this in two ways but perhaps the easiest is to go to the Central Administration Site and set this up.

To get to the central administration site go to Start Menu --> All Programs --> Administrative Tools --> SharePoint 3.0 Central Administration. After a while the central administration portal should open and it should look something like figure 5.1.  On the central part of the screen you should see a listing of application tasks, most of these we will ignore for this walkthrough, but there is one here that I will quickly configure now.

The first application task to look at is the task which states that the Central Administration Application Pool Account Should Be Unique. This is something that is easy to change, just click on the hyperlink, You will then get a screen which give you a brief description of the issue and how to resolve it. In this instance click on the action hyperlink, which should take you to the service accounts screen (See figure 5.2), in this screen we can configure the service account to use one of the accounts we set up earlier.

The steps we should follow here are firstly select the web application pool option, and in the drop down select our Windows SharePoint Services Web Application web service Then select the application pool, by default this will be SharePoint – 80. Finally select the configurable option and enter our WSSService account details, including password and then click on ok.

Conclusion

We should now have successfully installed and configured a single server instance of SharePoint Services 3.0. This is the most basic installation you can have for SharePoint Services and it does have its limitations. However, for small intranet installations, this is probably the easiest and most cost effective way to set up SharePoint, as it does not require extra hardware or additional licencing or software costs i.e SQL Server etc.  It is a good starting point for getting to grips with the installation and configuration before starting on a server farm based solution.