Installing a New Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Portal: Step-by-Step In

Figure 9: Configuration Database Settings Screen in the SPPT Wizard

in Figure 10, you'll be asked to decide which type of security settings you want to use for your farm.  First, you can specify a pre-selected port number for central administration to run on or you can allow the wizard to randomly assign a port number.  As you can see, this instance of the wizard randomly selected 17386 as the port number for Central Administration (CA).  If you want CA to run on a different port, then select the check box and enter the desired port number.

The issue of NTLM vs. Kerberos is one that you may at some point wish to consider.  Do you want the CA application to run using NTLM (NT Lan Manager) for security authentication or Kerberos?  If the latter, there are some special configurations you'll need to complete for your Active Directory (AD) before Kerberos will work.  I'm finding that most administrators are happy with NTLM, though those in a larger and more secure implementations are increasingly using Kerberos.  For purposes of my illustration here, I'm selecting NTLM.

Figure 10: Configure SharePoint Web Application configuration screen in SPPT Wizard

After you click Next, you'll be given a status bar that indicates how the SharePoint configuration is going.  Depending on the type of server you're installing and the options you're installing, you could have as few as seven tasks or as many as eleven.  Figure 11 illustrates the progress screen.  Note that the caption below the status bar will inform you about the configuration actions that are being executed during this process.

Figure 11: Configuration status bar screen in the SPPT Wizard

After the configurations have been executed and committed to the SQL Server database, we finally get to CA where we can further configure our farm.  We can start and stop services (Figure 12) on this server and then create web applications.  In order to have portal, you'll first need to start the Office SharePoint Server Search service and then create a Shared Services Provider (SSP).  I'll start the search service. 

Figure 12: Services configuration screen in CA

When the search service is started, you're presented with another web page for search configuration administration that needs to be completed before the search service can start.  The configuration options are pretty clear.  Out of the shoot, you'll use this server for both indexing and servicing queries from users until you can get enough servers in your farm to quarantine those options in your farm.  Select a location that has enough disk space for your indexes.  You should plan on a space allotment of 20% relative to the amount of information you wish to index.  You'll also need to input an email address, a service account and whether or not there is a dedicated WFE for all crawling activities.  For now, in my illustration, since this is the first server in the farm, I'll accept the defaults and click OK.

Figure 13: Search configuration screen

After starting the search service, the next thing I need to do is create a SSP.  In order to do this, I'll navigate to the Application tab in CA, click Create or Extend a Web Application, then click Create a New Web Application,  then make the configurations necessary that you see in Figure 14. Most of this is pretty self-explanatory, so I won't go through each input in detail.  Suffice to say that I've done two things not illustrated here.  First, after creating this web application, I then web back into CA, selected the Create or Configure Core Farm Services, then selected New SSP (Figure 15) and then filled in the configuration information for the new SSP.  All of the options on that page are self-explanatory, except that you must select an Index server for the SSP to operate.

Backtracking just a bit, you can't have an Index server unless the Search services is started.  So, that's why I illustrated starting the search services first, then creating an SSP, then creating a portal.

Figure 14: Configuring the new web application to host the portal

Figure 15: Illustration of the SSP management interface where you can select to create a New SSP.

Once the SSP is created and the web application for the portal has been created, you can then create the portal.  The way to do this is to navigate to CA and then click Create Site Collection.  Be sure the http://portal is selected in the drop down list in the upper right-hand portion of the screen (Figure 16).   Note that on this screen, you'll need to ensure that you are creating the site collection at the root by selecting the "Create Site at this URL" where the URL path is "root", not in the Sites managed path.  Also, if you scroll down, you'll need to select the Corporate Intranet Site under the Publishing tab.  Microsoft has renamed the Portal to Corporate Intranet Site and placed it under the Publishing tab for web content publishing purposes.  BTW, even though I don't illustrate it here, be sure to give the site a title.

Figure 16: Create Site Collection Screen

At this point, you should now have a new portal, ready to aggregate, organize and present content for your enterprise, division or department.