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.

The first step is to install SharePoint in complete mode, but not to run the products and technology configuration wizard.  You’ll need to set up the configuration database using PowerShell if you want to use local accounts.  Follow this blog post for setting up the configuration database.

http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/blogs/fromthefield/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=112

You can continue with the configuration wizard after that, and will find that the farm has been configured correctly with the local administrator account.

At this point, everything in central administration should work except for searching.  The search query component will be stuck in “Initializing” state, and will never come online.  If you do any searches on the front-end, you’ll also get a SharePoint error, given the state of the query component.  To fix this, you’ll need to delete the Search Service Application, from the list of service applications, and then create a new one using PowerShell.  Follow this blog post, specifically the “The Search Fix” section, for how to do this in PowerShell.

http://soerennielsen.wordpress.com/2010/07/15/how-to-install-a-sharepoint-2010-complete-server-without-ad/

To clarify the steps for actually running the script, in Step 1 in the article, you actually have to run a command like the following in PowerShell to load the script:

. c:\SetupEnterpriseSearch.ps1

Then you have to run the following command to launch the function:

Start-EnterpriseSearch(”<path>\searchconfig.xml”)

Make sure that you have the correct settings in the XML file ahead of time.  After running this PowerShell script, the search service application should be built and online, and you should be able to build the index and start searching.

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.)

Here’s an example of how the menus open by default, behind the Flash content.

After much digging around, I was able to find a way to correctly display the menus in front of Flash content.  You have to add the following parameters to your actual object html code for the Flash object, to make it transparent.

Add the following parameter to the OBJECT tag:

   <param name=”wmode” value=”transparent”>

Add the following parameter to the EMBED tag:

   wmode=”transparent”

After that the page menus should load correctly, as shown below.

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.

If you choose to keep the 2007 master page and add the new controls into it, this post lists all of the steps:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee539981(office.14).aspx

If you plan to start with a new 2010 master page, a starter minimal master page can be found here:

http://startermasterpages.codeplex.com/

I also found the following pages invaluable.  This blog post lists all of the base css classes in the SharePoint master page.

http://erikswenson.blogspot.com/2010/01/sharepoint-2010-base-css-classes.html

This blog lists the styles you’ll need to modify to change the look and feel of the menus:

http://blog.drisgill.com/2009/11/sp2010-branding-tip-7-using-simple.html

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.

In SharePoint 2010, this can be done pretty easily in the CSS file by modifying the following two styles.

#s4-leftpanel
{
 display:none;
}

That style controls the left navigation panel, and setting the display to none effectively hides the entire section.  Hiding this section is not enough though, since the body area uses a left margin to specify where to start the body section.  So you would also need to modify the following style, to tell the body area to start at 5 pixels from the left, or wherever you want to start the main area.

.s4-ca
{
 margin-left: 5px;
 background: transparent;
}

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.

Once this limit is reached, you’ll see errors like the following, when trying to do anything in SharePoint.  I saw this error just trying to activate a feature.  You’ll also get errors when tying to check out files or import new files.

Could not allocate space for object ‘dbo.EventCache’.'EventCache_Id’ in database

Some solutions to work around this are to switch to SQL Server, which doesn’t have a file size limit, or to try to implement remote BLOB storage.  Getting the BLOBS out of SQL will significantly reduce the database size.  If the environment is just a test environment, you could also delete enough files out of the database or move files to a different database.

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.

Site Settings will look as follows:

All you have to do to fix is turn on the publishing features.  The “Master Page” setting is now dependant on the publishing infrastructure.  First, go into Site Collection Features and enable “SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure” at the site collection level.  Then go into Manage Site Features and enable “SharePoint Server Publishing” at the site level.

You’ll then get the master page and layout links as shown below:

After installing the Office Web Apps, the first thing you’ll notice is a few new options when accessing the context menu of a document in SharePoint 2010.  The new options include View in Browser, Edit in Browser, and Edit in Microsoft Word.

SharePoint 2010 with Office Web Apps

Clicking on Edit in Microsoft Word will simply launch the version of Word that you have installed locally on your workstation.  But what if you don’t have Word installed?  What if you are on a hotel kiosk computer or a netbook?  In that case, you can click on Edit in Browser to access the Word 2010 Web App.  This will open the document for editing with your browser.  This is designed to work in IE, Firefox, and Safari; but will require the SilverLight plug-in to be installed for the best user experience.

The look and feel of the Word 2010 Web App is quite impressive.  There are navigation links across the top of the browser that can take you back to Client or Matter sites if you have those.  There is also the Office Ribbon Bar built right-in, and a link to launch the document with the locally installed Word client.    Tired of working with the current browser window?  Simply click the Pop-Out icon, highlighted in red in the upper right of the document, to open a new browser window without all the other browser toolbars cluttering the view.

Word 2010 Web App

Until Office 2010 is officially released, you will need to edit the document in the browser using the Word 2010 Web App if you want to take advantage of the simultaneous editing feature.    It will also be interesting to see which other features of the full Word 2010 product Microsoft incorporates into the Web App — Document Comparison?  Track Changes?    We’ll keep our ears to the wall.

The SharePoint 2010 Beta has finally been released, and this article will just give a few tips to make the installation smoother if you decide to install.  The first step is to choose which version to install.  It’s being released as two versions–An Internet facing version, for organizations that will use it to create public web sites and extranet sites, and an Intranet version, for internal corporate intranets.  Both versions will support and incorporate all of the features available in SharePoint 2010.

The Internet facing version can be downloaded here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=77195785-0282-4ACC-B6F4-7569E1011581&displaylang=en

The Intranet version can be found here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=77C30C6C-47FC-416D-88E7-8122534B3F37&displaylang=en

These are the hardware requirments, according to Microsoft:

The requirements below apply to single server with built-in database installations and server farm installations that include a single server or multiple servers in the farm.
For other configurations, click here for details regarding your configuration scenario.
Processor: 64-bit, dual processor, 3 GHz
RAM:

4 GB for stand-alone or evaluation installation.
8 GB for single server and multiple server farm installation for production use.

Hard Disk: 80 GB.

In terms of software, the machine must be running a 64 bit version of Windows 2008.

Additionally, you’ll need to install the following before installing SharePoint:

• Install SP2 for Windows 2008.  The SharePoint pre-req analyzer is not reliable with this service pack, so you should download and install SP2 separately before attempting to install SharePoint.
• If you plan on doing a complete install on a single box, first download and install SQL 2008 Express SP1 (x64).  You should always choose a Complete install rather than a single server install, however the complete install requires that you install and connect to SQL separately.
• Uninstall PowerShell 1.0 if it is installed.
• Install KB971831 (an update for Windows), using one of these links :
  • For Windows Server 2008 with SP2, see FIX: A hotfix that provides a method to support the token authentication without transport security or message encryption in WCF is available for the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1(http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=160770).
  • For Windows Server 2008 R2, see FIX: A hotfix that provides a method to support the token authentication without transport security or message encryption in WCF is available for the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1(http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=166231).