So today, I decided to have a little Sharepoint 2007 of my own. I installed Windows Server 2008 on a VMWare host, activated Remote Desktop, added Sharepoint 2007 and then MOSS 2007. I choose the x86 version of WS2008 because I wanted to limit RAM usage. With only 1GB of RAM, it worked like a charm and it is really fast.

Installing MOSS 2007 wasn’t as simple as you could expect. I had to “patch” the MOSS 2007 install CD with the MOSS 2007 SP1, following this post. You don’t have to follow exactly what it says. You can just take the content of the x86 (or x64 if you have a x64 arch) directory, put it somewhere (like C:\mossinstall) and then do the upgrade with the SP1 by typing “officeserver2007sp1-kb936984-x86-fullfile-en-us.exe /extract:c:\mossinstall\updates”.

By the way, you don’t need to do the same thing with WSS as you can find an already updated version of WSS 3.0, compatible with Windows Server 2008. I guess you could also find (or more likely buy) an updated version of MOSS 2007, but I didn’t.

I’ve developped a little bit on sharepoint but I never installed one. What is pretty astonishing from my point of view is that the installer setups the SSE SQL Server, the IIS + ASP.Net server and then configure everything automatically. It is as easy to install as any software.