1. Microsoft SharePoint Edition :

With the  release of SharePoint 2010, the free WSS/ MOSS has gone and it has been replaced with SharePoint Foundation 2010.

SharePoint Foundation 2010 is the very basic version. It replaced Windows SharePoint Services from earlier version.

FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint: SharePoint Server 2010 with high-end Search Technology. It has lots of powerful features include recognizing departments or geographies, ability to tag meta data to unstructured contentm and more scalability.

SharePoint Server 2010 for Internet Sites, Standard Edition: To create Internet or intranet sites using the standard features of SharePoint Server 2010

SharePoint Server 2010 for Internet Sites, Enterprise Edition: more scalability and management functions than Standard Edition

SharePoint Online: Cloud Version of SharePoint

2. Enhanced SharePoint Designer: What’s new with SharePoint Designer 2010 is subject of another post. With re-designed User Interface, improved workflow and integration between various designers SharePoint Designer has gone far from just supporting tool. Microsoft has been steadily putting the ribbon UI in many of its products, including SharePoint 2010. The new designer also has a tabbed interface and provides breadcrumb navigation.

3. Range of Web Browser Support:

SharePoint 2010 provides better experience for users accessing SharePoint sites with non-IE web browsers. But there some features are still inaccessible in non-IE browsers due their Active-X nature.

In SharePoint Foundation there are 11 instances of ActiveX controls. Some of major components availability is only with IE 8.0 including Multiple file uploads and datasheet view.

Also IE 6 is not supported officially. Chrome officially not declared, but it works fine.

4. New and Enhanced Collaboration Features

Microsoft has added and improved the collabration features including People Management, Blogs, Wikis, Social/Expertise Tagging and Calendar. Contents can now be tagged, bookmarked, and commented by an authorized user. That information can be used for content discovery.

A mash-up feature has been added where the calendar from Microsoft Exchange Server can be blended with SharePoint calendar.

The first and most the important point is that Windows 7 for SharePoint 2010 is not suitable for Production but only for Development Testing. The second point is that 32 bit of Windows 7 is not supported at all. I have Dell laptop with 2 GB RAM but installing 64 bit Windows 7 was very slow process than 32 bit installation.

OK, So I was ready with Windows 7 64 Bit finally. After installing bunch of Service Packs, patches and updates and finally MS SQL 2008 Express Edition I straightly installed Windows 7 Optimization tools.   Yes, you will definitely require it. I preferred Win7Zilla, it’s professional, but you can use any other free tools.

You can also keep handy some of the best Startup Managers, eg. CC Cleaner, my personal Choice. Why I am telling you to install Startup manager or optimization tools is because SharePoint really slows down the windows, so be prepared in advance. You may need to run some defragmentation tools to speed up your computer.

Simply Try Soluto! if you want to see the process which is making your system very slow.

Soluto Is an Awesome Tool to Speed Up Your System Boot, Fix System Slowdowns

Soluto reminds me my early days with SoftICE! It is really great tool.

Once you are ready to protect your OS from the bad reactions you can start installing SharePoint 2010. Now you can start collecting the requirements for the installing SharePoint 2010.

By the time your system should be loaded with the following tools;

1. Windows 7 OS 64 Bit
2. IIS 7
3. Microsoft .NET Framework 4
4. SQL Server 2005 or 2008
5. SQL Server 2008 KB if you are installing 2008
6. WCF Hotfix (KB971831)
7. IIS Hotfix (KB967535)
8. Microsoft FilterPack 2.0 – Included in the setup
9. Microsoft Sync Framework
10. Windows Identity Foundation (Windows6.1-KB974405-x64.msu)
11. Microsoft Geneva Framework Runtime for x64 * Beta 1 or 2 will not work, so you have to download the latest Framework.

Great, now open the installation folder of SharePoint 2010 and double click on Setup.exe. You will see the following error.

Platform Compatibility Error

As I said earlier, SharePoint 2010 is not supported on Windows 7, so you have to do a trick.

Using the text editor, more specifically Notepad, edit the installation config.xml file, you will find it at this path; <Drive/Installation Folder/>files\Setup\config.xml .

Add or edit this line inside the configuration tag;

<Setting Id="AllowWindowsClientInstall" Value="True"/>

Your Configuration file should look like this;

<Configuration>
  <Package Id="sts">
   ...
  <Setting Id="UsingUIInstallMode" Value="1" />
  <Setting Id="SETUP_REBOOT" Value="Never" />
  <Setting Id="AllowWindowsClientInstall" Value="True"/>
</Configuration>

Now enable following windows Features using ‘Turn Windows features On or Off’ from control panel.

Enable Windows Features

You can directly copy the following text and save as .cmd file and run in command prompt.

Do not forget to remove the line breaks before executing following command as this command should come in single line.

start /w pkgmgr /iu:IIS-WebServerRole;IIS-WebServer;IIS-CommonHttpFeatures;
IIS-StaticContent;IIS-DefaultDocument;IIS-DirectoryBrowsing;IIS-HttpErrors;
IIS-ApplicationDevelopment;IIS-ASPNET;IIS-NetFxExtensibility;IIS-ISAPIExtensions;
IIS-ISAPIFilter;IIS-HealthAndDiagnostics;IIS-HttpLogging;IIS-LoggingLibraries;
IIS-RequestMonitor;IIS-HttpTracing;IIS-CustomLogging;IIS-Security;IIS-BasicAuthentication;
IIS-WindowsAuthentication;IIS-DigestAuthentication;IIS-RequestFiltering;IIS-Performance;
IIS-HttpCompressionStatic;IIS-HttpCompressionDynamic;IIS-WebServerManagementTools;
IIS-ManagementConsole;IIS-IIS6ManagementCompatibility;IIS-Metabase;IIS-WMICompatibility;
WAS-WindowsActivationService;WAS-ProcessModel;WAS-NetFxEnvironment;WAS-ConfigurationAPI;
WCF-HTTP-Activation;WCF-NonHTTP-Activation

Done. Now Restart your computer and start SharePoint installation.

To install SharePoint 2010, you can just double click on Setup.exe from the installation folder. Accept the Microsoft’s license terms and select Standalone Installation to install everything on a single computer.

After the installation is complete, you are prompted to start the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard. and now your painful journey can start!

So Best Of Luck before clicking on check-box to Start the SharePoint Product and Technologies Configuration Wizard.

Installation Successful

Failed to connect to the configuration database.

While running Configuration wizard, you might end up with this common error, ‘Failed to connect to the configuration database’. But take a look at bottom text carefully and always checkout the Additional exception information:. You will see something like this.

Failed to create configuration database.

Could not load file or assembly ‘Microsoft.IdentityModel’

The most common error is Microsoft.IdentityModel. It is off course related to Microsoft Geneva Framework.

An exception of type System.IO.FileNotFoundException was thrown. Additional exception information: Could not load file or assembly ‘Microsoft.IdentityModel, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35′ or one of its dependencies.

It seems Windows Identify Foundation is missing. Install it from here. Look at the Version carefully. Uninstall Geneva Framework and install the correct version.

Somewhere you can get ‘Microsoft.IdentityModel, Version=3.0.0.0…, so identify the correct one.

Some or all identity references could not be translated.

An exception of type System.Security.Principal.IdentityNotMappedException was thrown.  Additional exception information: Some or all identity references could not be translated.
System.Security.Principal.IdentityNotMappedException: Some or all identity references could not be translated.

This is quite rare error, but you might get it if you have not fresh installed box. I got this error because I installed and configured IIS 4 times, installed and configured MOSS several times and don’t even know how many services are running for alone SQL Server.

This error surely comes because of wrong/bad permissions to SQL Service to the application pool. Just configure the permissions perfectly with your SQL services and you will get the rid of this error.

If you really want to avoid this error, then install and configure the SharePoint on fresh windows 7 installation.

An exception of type System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException was thrown.  
Additional exception information: Could not find stored procedure 'dbo.proc_getObjectsByClass'.

If you are using Microsoft SQL Server 2005, you might encounter with this error. Try to configure Surface area setting of SQL Server 2005.

1. Start SQL Server Surface Area Configuration from Configuration Tools in Start Menu of Windows.

2. In the SQL Server 2005 Surface Area Configuration dialog box, click Surface Area Configuration for Services and Connections.

3. In the tree view, expand the node for your instance of SQL Server, expand the Database Engine node, and then click Remote Connections.

4. Select Local and Remote Connections, select Using both TCP/IP and named pipes, and then click OK.

Also there is fix for this error from Microsoft. Follow it.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/sbs/archive/2007/05/22/trouble-installing-sharepoint-3-0-after-wsus-3-0.aspx

He reasoned that resignation, ‘As to why I left, it’s difficult to answer: just about anything I could say that would be accurate and honest would do more harm than good.’

Off course, it was not surprise to us since most of the people expecting that sooner or later. He wrote the blog post on his blog, about his resignation from Oracle on 2nd April, 2010. After the acquisition of Sun Microsystems, Oracle is doing Sun more harm than good. The deal was loss making for both Sun and Oracle but the future after the deal could have been a lot better.

Many of the people commented earlier on Oracle’s management. James Gosling follows a number of other noted ex-Sun employees out the door since Oracle’s purchase of the company was finalized in January, including CEO Jonathan Schwartz, and XML co-inventor Tim Bray.

Even Tim Bray tweeted that he was “astounded that Gosling held on so long.”

Anyways, I feel it’s a good move. James has not given just Java to the community, it is complete age.

“The hardest part is no longer being with all the great people I’ve had the privilege to work with over the years. I don’t know what I’m going to do next, other than take some time off before I start job hunting.”

We are waiting for next revolutionary age, James! Don’t take a rest! And Best Of Luck!!

— Nathan Myhrvold, former Microsoft CTO

“Network not connected and offline login failed”

If this is the error you are getting, then the reason is might be you are behind the proxy.

Do not worry! Instead of log in with your Google account to the OS, use the following id.

chronos@gmail.com with blank password

At least you can get the feel of the OS.

Then you check the other network options.

http://www.youtube.com/user/googlechrome#p/u/0/ANMrzw7JFzA

The excellent source for learning!