When Windows 7 came out last week, I decided to go ahead and install it on my laptop. I like what I see so far–everything seems to run faster in Windows 7! Same hardware; the apps just launch faster. For example, SharePoint Designer used to take 5-10 seconds to launch when it was Vista. Now, I can get SharePoint Designer to run in 2 seconds. Visual Studio 2008 used to be 5-10 seconds to launch as well. Now Visual Studio 2008 opens up like I’m opening Internet Explorer! Now, I’ve always ran SharePoint in a Windows Server 2003 virtual machine. And it was decent performance. But now that I’m seeing Windows 7 to be more efficient, I thought, what if I just ran SharePoint (MOSS) in Windows 7, forget about running it in a virtual machine?
I found this walkthrough from Bamboo Solutions on how to install SharePoint on Windows 7. It worked and all I can say is wow! Now, there were two issues that I ran into when I tried to follow the walkthrough. First issue I ran into was is making the boot-strapper launch the MOSS installer. I have the original media from 2007 and no matter how many times I tried to make Bamboo Solution’s setup-helper launch that setup.exe, it wouldn’t launch it. The error message that I got was:
I tried renaming the setup.exe file to SharePoint.exe, thinking maybe, just maybe the setup-helper is file-name dependent. It didn’t work. Finally, I decided to just go ahead and download the trial version of MOSS (if you have proper license):
If you don’t have MOSS license, just download WSS 3.0. If you have MOSS license, you can enter your key during the installation to make the installation permanent. I tried x64 MOSS 2007 trial with the Bamboo helper and it worked.
One more issue I ran into was when I ran the SharePoint Configuration Wizard for the first time. It said that I don’t have IIS installed. Well, I already had IIS running–IIS 7. When I picked the Windows feature to install, I did not select the IIS 6 Management Compatibility:
The moment I turned on IIS 6 Management Compatibility, the SharePoint Configuration Wizard was able to proceed.
I’m very happy with my laptop setup now. I have MOSS running on it and I don’t even need a virtual machine anymore. Do I think it’s risky to install MOSS on my base OS? I don’t think so; I’ve been installing and running SharePoint since 2007 and I have yet to see it mess up the operability of an application or service in Windows. But then again, I’ve always used Windows 2003 Server. Who knows what kind of issue I will run into running MOSS on top of Windows 7.
As much as I recommend you guys trying MOSS/SharePoint on Windows 7, I highly recommend you run the upcoming SharePoint 2010 beta on a virtual machine only! When SharePoint 2010 Beta comes out next month, I will be running that inside a virtual Windows 2008 Server.
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