SharePoint 2010 can be easily deployed to a single box with local administrator accounts using the standalone, out-of-the-box install, but this forces you to use SQL Express 2008 (which comes with SharePoint). What if you want to do a complete farm install on the box, but stick with local accounts? Then this becomes a lot more tricky.
The complete install, using the configuration dialogs, will not let you enter local accounts, and will force you to use a domain account. The best practice seems to be to promote the server to a domain controller, and use domain accounts, however this might not be possible or desired if you’re working in a DMZ, or on a development machine. Also, you might want to do the complete install so that you can leverage the 10 GB data limit and remote BLOB storage in SQL 2008 Express R2, rather than being stuck to the earlier version of SQL Express which comes with SharePoint. Luckily, there’s some ways to bypass the domain account requirement by using PowerShell scripting to set up the environment. I found two helpful blog posts below which get you part of the way there, and I’ll help clarify some of the missing pieces.
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The Citrix Web Interface allows you to publish desktop applications as links on a web page. If only one link is published, such as a “Windows 7 Desktop” link, then users will have to come into the web interface and manually click on the link to launch it. It’s easy however, to update the code on the home page so that the published desktop automatically launches when the user opens the web interface. This shortcut saves users a click and some time, and makes the process more streamlined, especially if there is only one published application.
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The Problem – Hidden Outlook Reminders
In Outlook 2003, 2007, and 2010, reminder windows pop up in Outlook, but they do not steal the focus if you are working in another program. For example, if you currently working in Word or Internet Explorer, you won’t see a reminder window if one pops up, since you’re not in Outlook.
In previous versions of Windows, this wasn’t as big of a deal because you would still see the reminder window in the task bar. So even though you didn’t see the actual window, you would see the tab for it flashing on the taskbar.
In Windows 7 however, the default grouping of same-application windows, makes is much harder to see when a reminder window pops up. For example, the image below shows a second Outlook window, which is actually a reminder window.
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In SharePoint 2007, menus in some master pages opened behind page content and Flash animations. However, there was an easy fix which was to just locate the css style for the dynamic menus, and change the “z-index” property to a high number. This same fix does not work in 2010 however, and to make matters worse, the menus on the default master page in 2010 always open behind Flash videos. (The built-in Silverlight web part in 2010 does not have this problem, but I suspect there are still many people who will have home pages with Flash content.)
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When upgrading from SharePoint 2007 to 2010, you’ll need to upgrade your master pages (if they’re customized) to take advantage of the new features in 2010, such as the ribbon. The first question is to decide if you want to keep the current master page and add all the new controls in, or to start with a new 2010 master page and customize that. We decided to start with a new master page based on the 2010 master page, v4.master, and customize that. Here’s some resources I found useful when creating the new custom master page for our site.
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A common situation in organizations is to make calendars public, so that employees can see other employee’s availability, and collaborate better. Users may also delegate rights to other users to view their messages, tasks, and contacts. In these situations, people may rely on marking sensitive items private to hide them from other users. In Outlook or OWA, other users will see a placeholder for the private items, but won’t be able to view any of the details. However, you should keep in mind that this privacy is only a feature of the client application–Outlook or OWA–and is not inherent to Exchange. Exchange itself does not support any kind of item-level security or privacy, and only has a field called “sensitivity” which is used by Outlook and OWA. The client applications look at that field to determine whether to display the item.
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When designing the layout and branding for new SharePoint 2010 sites, some people may wish to hide the left-hand navigation and only use top navigation. Hiding the left-hand navigation allows for more space for content and a possible cleaner looking interface. In SharePoint’s Site Settings, you can turn off the quick launch and tree view, however that still leaves the navigation bar on the page with only a recycling bin. In order to entirely remove the bar, you would need to either modify the master page or CSS linked to the master page.
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The single-server out of the box SharePoint 2010 installation uses SQL Express, which comes with a 4 GB limit. This is in contrast to SharePoint 2007 which used the Windows Internal Database, a version of SQL Express with no size limit. If you’re upgrading an existing environment or planning to import a bunch of files, you may easily hit this limit.
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When you create new sites in SharePoint 2010, you may find that “Master Page” is missing from the site settings, and there’s no apparent easy way to change the master page, outside of SharePoint Designer. This happens when the publishing features are not enabled, and is easy to fix by just enabling the right features.
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