What to Expect When You’re Expecting-The SharePoint Edition
When my wife was pregnant with our son, I had no clue what to expect from a brand new baby, much less her being pregnant. Fortunately for me, my wife is a profound believer on educating yourself as best as possible to meet the unknown of any frontier if you know it’s coming. And she of course bought plenty of books to help us both in this endeavor of utmost importance. This lesson, however, was not lost on me at all. I immediately realized that this should be applied almost anywhere, and since this is a SharePoint discussion, here’s where it will be applied.
So you’re a veteran IT Pro, you know the ins and outs of your infrastructure, and now you’re about to get visited by the Microsoft stork; SharePoint is coming! So maybe you read about it, maybe you talked to a few people, maybe Microsoft or a consulting house shared some details and information with you, but up to now it’s been more about what SharePoint can do, where it will live, what it might look like, and that your life is about to change dramatically. And just like holding that newborn child, your life is about to change dramatically; for the better or worse, however, is entirely up to you.
Your first priority is to know what you’re about to get. I know Microsoft or the consulting house has been phenomenal with your business decision makers, but you will support it, maintain it, grow it and ultimately prove the return on investment for it, so any amount of arming yourself will not be in vain. The first, best thing, beyond the basic information exchange, is to field test this thing. We live in a rampant virtualization age where code flows like milk and honey and we no longer need a piece of dedicated hardware just to represent that test box, so get your virtualization on and build yourself a test machine.
A test build will help you learn a few things; SharePoint has a prerequisite installer, so if you have Internet access, you can trigger this install first, and the installer will insure you have at least your requirements installed, but can also (and will) install your optional items as well. However, while Speech Server would be a nice addition to your implementation, you don’t need it for SharePoint to work, so feel free to skip the Speech elements and Reporting Services add-ins on your test. You can always put it in later if you need to test this. And because it’s probably virtual, you can snapshot it and roll back in case you don’t like it. If it’s not virtual, take advantage of system restore points. Once the prerequisite installer pulls down and installs all the elements a happy SharePoint system will need, proceed with the installation.
The second thing this build will teach you is that you’re going to need service accounts. In this version, we use Managed Accounts that are mostly predesignated; that is, you create them before you get to setup.exe and you need to tell them to SharePoint early on. However, this is a test, and you’ll quickly learn that you won’t repeat this install in your production environment without some managed accounts first. Either that or when you go to change the password on the installation account, probably your own personal administrator account, you’ll also quickly learn that SharePoint will stop working—and you’ll probably learn this from your user base before you find out yourself. There’s a lot of guidance out there on how many accounts you’ll need or should have, so read up and be prepared.
Thirdly, you’ll find that an install does not configure SharePoint in any way; this is the job of a program called the SharePoint Products Configuration Wizard, who will step you through the creation of your SharePoint Farm, your Central Administration application, and the web applications that will support such on this server. That means that before SharePoint will allow you to create web applications for your users, you must run this Wizard. The good news is its set to run by default, so if you chose to delay the configuration (for instance, if you wanted to pre-create your configuration database for your farm), you can handle that now. If things like SharePoint Farm, Central Administration, web application or configuration database are new or unfamiliar terms, you’ll learn what these things are with proper training. Are you getting yet that training is important?
After the installation and configuration completes, among other things that happen with the configuration wizard, you’ll eventually get to Central Administration and will be introduced to the Farm Configuration Wizards. These fellows didn’t exist in the previous version, but this version introduces Service Applications, a powerful and diverse infrastructure change that will make any deployment as granular-by-service as one could want, and the Farm Wizards will gladly construct the necessary elements involved in getting most of SharePoint’s bells and whistles going for you when you’re ready to deploy those features. You don’t have to run them, but be aware that you need to set up web applications, application proxies and service databases for each Service Application, such as User Profiles or PerformancePoint Services, before you can use those services. What’s the best way to go? You guessed it! A little training is going to go a long way.
Now you’ve completed your test install, and you’ve learned several things; you need prerequisites, you need service accounts, you need service application objects and you likely need training for all of that. However, this is only the beginning. When you first swaddle your newborn SharePoint implementation, the questions will swarm through you as both elation and dread fill your gut. But don’t worry, information is out there. Be like my wife and play it smart; get educated and get prepared. And in case you’re wondering, we’ll follow up this article with another, likely “What to Expect: The First Year—The SharePoint Edition.”
See you then!
Timothy Calunod
Technology Lead: SharePoint, Windows 7