It’s taken a little bit longer than we had hoped, but we’re finally done! I’m thrilled to announce that we have published our complete SharePoint 2013 Set up Guide for Developers for SharePoint 2013 RTM! This guide follows on our very successful and popular set up guide for SharePoint 2010. It walks you thought creating a SharePoint environment using all the publically available trial installs starting with installing Windows Server all the way through installing the developer tools. It even includes the steps you’ll need to follow to host apps in your local development environment.
Unlike the beta releases of this guide, we’ve streamlined it to build a single virtual machine rather than two virtual machines. Previously in the betas we needed two servers as Workflow Manager wouldn’t install on a domain controller, but the final release of the product has changes that enable it to be built on a single server.
One thing we did a little different this time around is that when there’s some configuration steps that could be automated using PowerShell, such as when you need to configure the server to host apps, we handle that for you with some PowerShell scripts we provide as part of the set up guide. We don’t script the entire install… frankly we believe some stuff developer should do in order to understand the process.
In the guide we strove to push some best practices, such as Microsoft’s recommendation to use host-named site collections, but we also kept in mind that this is a developer environment. Therefore we didn’t create separate service accounts and application pools for every service application. Everything is based on Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 and SQL Server 2012. We elected to pass on Windows Server 2012 for now because the user interface is so dramatically different. We’ll have an update soon that has a set up guide for Windows Server 2012… stay tuned!
Even though we’ve reached the release of SharePoint 2013, I’m sure we’ll find a few extra steps. I’ve added a change log to the document so you can see the changes with each release. We’ll post announcements every time we publish an release on our Twitter account (@criticalpath) using the hashtag #sp2013setupguide. We’re sure there will be some feedback… if you have suggestions or bugs you find, please send them in to support using our contact form.
The set up guide is located in the Critical Path Training Members section of our site, specifically in the Articles section listed as SharePoint Server 2013 Preview Virtual Machine Set up Guide (v1.0). A sign in is required, but it’s free to set one up.