Installing SharePoint Server 2010 on Windows 7

I am back with another post.

This post is regarding the steps that you need to consider if you want to install SharePoint Server 2010 on Windows 7. Yes, SharePoint can now be installed on windows 7 and on windows vista as well. This provision is given for developers only who can test and build application or tools on top of SharePoint Server 2010. SharePoint Server 2010 running on any client OS is not supported in production.
The product team came up with this idea because with MOSS 2007 we got not install the product any client O.S and the developer who did not need a server OS for their developement, had to install Windows server 2003 or Windows Server 2008 and then work with MOSS 2007.

So now lets see how we can install Windows 7:

• First decide the OS on which you would like to install SharePoint Server 2010. This blog is for installing SharePoint Server 2010 on windows 7 (64 bit).
• Put the media and open the setup file location.
• Open the location  "C:\SharePointFiles\files\Setup\config.xml".
• Add the following xml code : "Setting Id="AllowWindowsClientInstall" Value="True"  (at a look at the snapshot)
• After adding the xml will look like the following. The snapshot is related to SharePoint Server 2010 and not SharePoint Foundation 2010 (the new name for WSS 4.0). The above code is case sensitive and hence maintain the same case.

•  Next step is the longest and the most important one. While you are installing SharePoint Server 2010 you will not be able to run the Pre-Requisite Installer as it will only run on Windows Server 2008 with SP2 and Windows Server 2008 R2. So you need to download and install all the prequiste manually. To make it easy to find all the pre-requiuste at a single place please follow this link .  You will find all the pre-requistes here.
• Once the pre-requistes are done then you need to make your IIS ready on Windows 7. For that we have given a script that you can find in this location . Or the way I did was to enable the IIS first from command line and send enable the features manually. Below is the screen shot of the features that I enabled manually.

• Once this is done click on the setup.exe which you find in "C:\SharePointFiles\Setup.exe".
• You can choose Standalone or Advanced Option ( to choose complete) depending on how much resources you can give for SharePoint. I choosed Standalone for two reasons. 1. I did not have a full-blow SQL Server 2. My laptop on which I am installing has only 4GB RAM.
• Its left to you on what you want to choose.
• Once done with the first phase of installation, then you need to install the SQL Server 2008 KB 970315 x64 . Its the Cummalative Update 2 for SQL Server 2008 SP1.
• Then complete the configuration wizard and yes you are done.

Enjoy Sharing on Windows 7.