I have been wanting to write a blog about Content Type in SharePoint for months now, which seems to be a common theme of mine. I have dozens of blog ideas and zero time. But, with a few days off during the holidays I decided to tackle some of my ideas. So here goes . . .
In an effort to end the year on a good note, I’ve taken on a huge challenge. About a year ago I sat down to video capture an entire installation of a Virtual PC image of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. Although the video took me several days to complete, once I finished the installation I never went back to the video. Now, a year later <<
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SharePoint uses service accounts to run specific services behind the scenes. SharePoint does not function under the practice of “running everything as administrator”. There are several documents regarding all of the different service accounts that are recommended for SharePoint, but for some organizations the sheer number of accounts is simply not manageable. So I’ve put together a list of what I would consider the minimum accounts (and rights) for a typical SharePoint installation. The account you use to run setup on any server where MOSS needs to be installed must belong to the local administrators group. In addition, this account must be a Domain User and be a member of the following SQL server security roles: Logins, Securityadmin & Dbcreator. This account is responsible for creating new databases and creating new IIS sites so it is important to make sure the right permissions are set. <<Read more . . . >>
There is plenty of documentation on how to install and configure SharePoint. For the novice SharePoint user there are step-by-step guides, and for the more experienced user there are checklists. During all of these instructions there is very little emphasis on the proper use of Service Accounts used to install and configure SharePoint. It is, by far, one of the ways that you can spend days in SharePoint install and uninstall. In most cases, when I visit a client to help with the installation, they insist on using less accounts, and in some cases pre-existing accounts. I highly discourage this, but sometimes my clients have to learn for themselves.
Two things we have to consider when utilizing these accounts are creating the proper collection of service accounts to perform specific SharePoint tasks and associating the required permissions for the accounts, which includes domain permissions, local permissions on each server in our farm and SQL Server permissions. There is a great chart Microsoft has put together that you can check out here.
So now that you know what you should do, let's also discuss what you should not do.
1. Don't use existing domain accounts. Create service accounts specifically for SharePoint.
2. Don't install SharePoint using your own credentials.
3. Don't change passwords of the accounts. When you change your passwords that have no idea where these passwords were hard coded into SharePoint and all kinds of issues will happen.
3. Don't forget to use non-expiring passwords.
4. Don't use service accounts to test or administer the portal. These accounts should not be used for managing sites.
5. Don't give out the service account credentials.
6. Don't change service account associations without doing it the "right" way. Check here and here for more information.
7. Don't use cryptic naming conventions for the accounts. It is much easier to understand what SP_Search is used for as opposed to DomSpSvc01.
As much as I can emphasize these things to each and every client, there are those who still insist they can do this differently. That's okay, just know it is not going to be a one day installtion, but more like a four day installation, and eventually you may just resolve to doing it the Microsoft recommended way - why not just save yourself four days.
So this is one of my “in the trenches” blogs. I’ve been setting up a new server to run WSS 3.0, which I’ve done a dozen times. I have several SharePoint 2007 servers I am currently running, and WSS is a prerequisite, so this shouldn’t have been an all weekend project. But, for some reason, this particular install was not cooperating. I performed the same steps in the same order, except in this case I did not install SQL Server. In most of my installations I installed SQL Server since I would be using MOSS. So I installed Windows Server 2003 with IIS, the .NET Framework 2.0 and 3.0 and then tried installing WSS, but kept receiving the following error message:
Setup is unable to proceed due to the following error(s):
This product requires ASP.NET v2.0 to be set to ‘Allow’ in the list of Internet Information Services (IIS) Web Server Extensions. If it is not available in the list, reinstall ASP.Net v2.0.
Correct the issue(s) listed above and re-run setup.
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