Last week saw the official release of Microsoft SharePoint 2010 beta, which I eagerly got downloaded as soon as I could. The release promises to be a significant one for Microsoft when the product is made available to buy next year. For now though, those willing can have a play with the Beta, which you can get from here.
The biggest change, from the point of view of getting it up and running, is that the product is now 64-bit only. This instantly rules out running it in VPC, which is what I'd normally do. Instead, you can use Hyper-V on Windows Server 2008, or, as I did, tp://www.virtualbox.org/" target="_blank">VirtualBox from Sun, which is a free virtualization client that can handle 64-bit VMs on a normal desktop PC. I went for the new Server 2008 R2 release as the base OS for the VM, and SQL Server 2008 (all 64-bit obviously). For me, this was the first time I'd run this setup on my desktop machine, but the initial setup and installation was pretty painless. Unless the SharePoint bit!
Firstly, SharePoint 2010 requires a lot of cumulative update patches, which MS detail for you in the installation instructions. It's not a major issue, just takes some time to get the correct versions and get them all installed. Being me, I hadn't FULLY read through the installation guide top to bottom, and missed a few required updates. Thankfully, SharePoint prompted me along the way, advising each upgrade that was required.
Next was a case of actually getting SharePoint up and running. The initial install was straightforward, and instantly familiar to anyone who has played with 2007. Once you get into Central Admin, things begin to change, with a whole new setup wizard that guides you through the initial configuration of SharePoint. At this point, the problems began. Despite having a glut of memory and resources available, SharePoint ran incredibly slowly, and began to error intermittently, sometimes with timeout errors, sometimes with unknown errors that seemed to come and go at will. This seems to mirror some experiences I've read about on the web.
Whether or not these issues are down to VirtualBox, which I haven't used for this type of setup before, or that SharePoint 2010 really needs a lot of resources to perform well, I'll have to investigate. Ishai seems to suggest better luck with a non-virtualized setup, so I'll be trying that next. From the initial experience, the release is looking very promising, with some compelling new features (which I'll discuss in another post). Now if only I can get it running without it crashing all the time.........
Paul Dunlop
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