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. 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 publicly 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.
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. When possible we used RTM software, therefore we used Windows Server 2008 R2 with SP1 instead of Windows Server 2012. We do plan to update the guide, or maybe have a separate version of it when Windows Server 2012 RTM is available.
As with SharePoint 2013, it’s a beta release. 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 (v#.#). A sign in is required, but it’s free to set one up.