Sprydon

Installing Windows SharePoint Services on a Windows 7 machine is not directly supported by Microsoft but there is a way to do it and avoid having to build a Windows Server 2003 development machine just to carry out SharePoint development. As usual the problem has already been solved by someone else on the interweb.

The full details are set out in this blog post at Bamboo Nation.

But the key points to note are

• How to turn off the Application Compatibility Engine – this is the thing that prevents the SharePoint from installing on anything other than a Server platform such as Server 2003
• Using the SharePoint on Vista Helper file which lets run the setup file by tricking it into thinking its running on Server 2003
• Get the correct version of WSS installation files I found that only the WSS 3.0 Sp2 install worked for me but the article links to the sp1 version.

Finally the other thing that tripped me up was by default IIS 7 on Windows 7 does not not have Basic Authentication enabled and without that when you browse to the SharePoint administration site you just get a blank page – it easy to fix by starting the windows features dialog (type “features” and select “turn windows features on or off”) make sure that the check box for Basic Authentication under Internet Information Services –> World Wide Web Services –> Security is checked.

The next step is to then enable basic authentication to the SharePoint Administration site within the IIS Manager – see the image below: