Permission Level comparison for SharePoint

Posted on April 29, 2019 by Gaurav Mahajan

Permissions in SharePoint are managed through Permission Levels. Each permission level in turn maps to multiple permissions (things that you can OR cannot do in the different areas in SharePoint). There’s a lot of excellent guidance om what the different permission levels in SharePoint allow you to do. I did not however find a quick comparison around the different permissions each permission level maps to. So thought I’ll put together a quick spreadsheet showing the differences between the more common permission levels in SharePoint.

So here it goes – nothing fancy – just a quick comparison of the more common SharePoint permission levels, pulled together through an Excel online spreadsheet:

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Posted in Quick Tips, SharePoint, SharePoint Online, Tools | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

In browser viewing of Zip files in SharePoint Online

Posted on April 11, 2018 by Gaurav Mahajan

I have been toying (more like sitting on it :|) with the idea of creating an app for in-browser extraction of zip files that have been uploaded to SharePoint document libraries. It seems now however that Microsoft beat me to it. 🙂

If you have modern libraries enabled in your O365 tenant and you click on a zip file uploaded to a library, you will now notice that SharePoint will actually show you all the files within that archive within the browser – effectively extracting the zip file for you in the browser. You can then chose to download the entire archive or browse through folders and sub folders in the zip archive to download individual OR multiple files & folders from the archive. You still are not able to view in the browser the files from the archive so may be my app is still viable for now lol
A picture speaks (on in this case pictures) more than a thousand words so here it goes:

aZipFileInSharePoint
Fig 1: A Zip file in a modern SharePoint library
ZipFileExpanded-Level1
Fig 2: Zip file expanded to the first level
ZipFileExpanded-Level2
Fig 3: Zip file expanded to the second level – notice how you can choose to download a single folder from the zip archive
ZipFileExpanded-Level3
Fig 4: Zip file expanded to the third level – again, notice how you can choose to download multiple files from the zip archive

 

Posted in Quick Tips, SharePoint, SharePoint Online | Tagged , , | 9 Comments

SharePoint Server 2013 Virtual Machine Download – March 2018

Posted on March 14, 2018 by Gaurav Mahajan

The latest version of my SharePoint 2013 trial VM can be downloaded from my shared drive here: https://sp2013vm.page.link/download

I will encourage you to refer the complete details regarding the VM, download instructions, validity of the trial licenses and details on converting to retail licenses through my detailed original post here: SharePoint Server 2013 Virtual Machine Download

I have disabled comments on this post but please feel free to comment and/ or report any issues through the above post. This way any reported issues and resolution to those issues will stay in one place. 🙂

Good luck and hope you find the VM useful!

Gaurav

Posted in SharePoint, SharePoint 2013, SharePoint 2013, Virtual Machine | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

SharePoint Server 2016 Virtual Machine Download – March 2018

Posted on March 12, 2018 by Gaurav Mahajan

The latest version of my SharePoint 2016 trial VM can be downloaded from my shared drive here: https://sp2016vm.page.link/download

I will encourage you to refer the complete details regarding the VM, download instructions, validity of the trial licenses and details on converting to retail licenses through my detailed original post here: SharePoint Server 2016 Virtual Machine Download

I have disabled comments on this post but please feel free to comment and/ or report any issues through the above post. This way any reported issues and resolution to those issues will stay in one place. 🙂

Good luck and hope you find the VM useful!

Gaurav

Posted in SharePoint, SharePoint 2016, Virtual Machine | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

SharePoint Server 2016 Virtual Machine Download (Updated March 2018)

Posted on October 6, 2017 by Gaurav Mahajan

I earlier created this SharePoint 2013 Virtual machine on Win Server 2012 way back in Jan 2014 and have been updating it hence. 3 Years and thousands of downloads later I have received numerous requests for a similar SharePoint 2016 VM. I finally got the time to create one for everyone’s benefit. Following are the details of this SharePoint 2016 evaluation VM and how to download it:

  1. The VM was created using the VMWare Player version 6.0.3 which can be downloaded as a free download from the VMWare site. You can use the latest version of the free tool to launch it. Once you have downloaded it, you can also convert it into other formats to open it with another virtualization tool of your choice.
  2. It was created using the 180 day evaluation versions Windows Server 2012 R2, SQL Server 2016 and the SharePoint Server 2016 Trial license (Feb 2018 CU). If you’d like to, you can enter your own keys to activate the trial/ evaluation versions. These 180 day evaluation versions should be good through Sep 8th, 2018 Jan 29, 2018.
  3. It consists of 4 hard drives, a VMWare virtual machine configuration (.vmx) file and other supporting VMWare files. All the files and hard drives are part of 12 self-extracting compressed files. The total size of the compressed files is 11GB (with the total size of the extracted files at about 28 GB). These self-extracting(executable) archive can be downloaded from the download link mentioned below.
  4. The VM has 16 GB RAM allocated to it by default (controlled by the settings in the “.vmx” file or via the virtual machine settings in the VMWare player). You can reduce or increase the RAM to suite your needs, although, 12 GB is the minimum required and 16 GB is what I will recommend for this VM.
  5. It has the Classic Shell start menu installed from http://classicshell.sourceforge.net/ so you can get the old Windows start menu in addition to the new Windows “Start screen”. This also results in Windows booting up to the desktop instead of the new Windows start screen. Although, if you’d like to, you can get to the Start screen by clicking the Shift+Windows button combination. You can also configure Classic Shell so Windows boots up to the start screen instead, if you so desire.
  6. It has the gmsp2016.dev as the Active Directory domain and has the apps service configured to use the apps.gmsp2016.dev app domain.
  7. Once you start the VM, Windows will auto login to the SP_Admin account. This “gmsp2016\sp_admin” account was the account used to install SharePoint and should be used to access central admin. All accounts in the VM share the same password which is part of the ReadMe file accompanying the downloads.
  8. The virtual machine additionally has the following accounts created and used for various services:
    1. SP_Farm: The farm account
    2. SP_CacheSuperReader: The object cache read access account
    3. SP_CacheSuperUser: The object cache full access account
    4. SP_ExcelUser: Account used for excel services (not yet configured on the VM)
    5. SP_PeffPointUser: Account used for performance point services (not yet configured on the VM)
    6. SP_PortalAppPool: Account for the content web application pools
    7. SP_ProfilesAppPool: Web app pool for the MySites web application (not yet configured on the VM)
    8. SP_ProfileSync: The user profile synchronization account
    9. SP_SearchContent: The default content access account for the Search Service Application
    10. SP_SearchService: Account to run the SharePoint Search “Windows Service
    11. SP_Services: Service Applications  App Pool account
    12. SP_VisioUser: Account used for Visio services (not yet configured on this VM)
    13. SQL_Admin: Used to Install the SQL Server
    14. SQL_Services: SQL service account for the MSSQLServer & SQLServerAgent services
      You can read more on different accounts for SharePoint in the following articles: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263445(v=office.15).aspx & http://www.toddklindt.com/blog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=39
  9. If the VM does not start after you have downloaded it, ensure that the number of files you have downloaded, the total size of the archived files and the total size of the extracted files matches what’s specified above.

Finally, all the files, including the ReadMe.txt are uploaded to the Google Drive folder at the following link: https://sp2016vm.page.link/download

You can download the files, using one of the following options:

  1. Add the folder to your Google Drive and then use the Google Drive Desktop Client to sync the files to your local computer (highly recommended) OR
  2. Download the files directly by using the browser “Save target as…” functionality (not really recommended and should be used if for some odd reason #1 does not work for you) OR
  3. There might be some download managers as well that might allow you to specify a google drive URL and download all files from their but I am not aware of any at the moment

Instructions for extracting the VM: You will need to download all the .rar and .exe files to your machine and then run the “SP2016.part01.exe” executable to unpack the virtual machine hard drives. After ensuring that you have the latest version of the VMWare Player installed, you can then double-click the “SP2016.vmx” file to run the virtual machine.

Instructions to activate the licenses: Here’s how you can activate the licenses for:

  1. For the OS (Windows Server 2012 R2): You can view the instructions in the comments for my previous blog here  or in the corresponding TechNet article here
  2. For SQL Server 2016: Unfortunately there’s no way to rearm a SQL Server Evaluation license. You will have to convert it to a retail license. The way to do that is to:
    1. Run the SQL Server setup
    2. Click on the maintenance tab
    3. Click on “Edition upgrade”
    4. Follow the steps till you reach the product key screen and enter your product key (usually pre-filled if a licensed installation media is used)
    5. You can read a good set of instructions for converting your eval license to a full license here: http://www.mssqlgirl.com/upgrading-from-sql-server-2012-evaluation-edition.html
  3. For SharePoint Server 2016:
    1. Browse to Central Admin –> Upgrade and Migration –> Convert farm license type
    2. On the Convert License Type page, in the Enter the Product Key box, type the new product key and then click OK.
    3. Verify that the license is upgraded by going back to the page
    4. Please note that the SharePoint 2016 trial is only available as an Standard trial. Consequently only Standard features are available by default. The good thing however is that you can easily upgrade your farm license type by entering the Enterprise License Key.

Please do not forget to refer the comments from my previous post if you run into any issues or have questions. The comments contain lots of information on the different environments in which people are using the similar SharePoint 2013 VM, any issues they’ve run into and solutions to those issues.

I hope you will find the VM useful. If you did, or if you have any questions or feedback, I will encourage you to leave a comment below OR reach out through my twitter handle: @mahajang!

Happy SharePointing! 🙂

Posted in Deployment, SharePoint, SharePoint 2016, Virtual Machine | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 82 Comments

Turn off the mobile view in SharePoint/ Office 365/ SharePoint Online

Posted on July 15, 2016 by Gaurav Mahajan

The Microsoft team recently released the SharePoint mobile app for iOS: https://blogs.office.com/2016/06/21/your-intranet-in-your-pocket-the-sharepoint-mobile-app-for-ios-is-now-available/
While the app in itself is pretty neat, it comes with it’s own limitations just like any other mobile app. The same holds true for the view of SharePoint sites that you see in a mobile browser. This is especially true if you have followed the principles for a responsive UI while building your site. So the question on how to turn off the mobile view has come up quite a few times during my SharePoint consulting engagements. Hence this quick post:

The easiest way to turn off the mobile view in your SharePoint 2013 or Share Point 2016 or Office 365 – SharePoint Online site is to deactivate the “Mobile Browser View” feature for the site:

MobileView

For those who are new to SharePoint, you can do this as follows:

  1. Click the gear icon on the top right corner of you site
  2. Click “Site settings”
  3. Click “Manage site features” under the “Site Actions” heading on the page
  4. Click the “Deactivate” button  for the “Mobile Browser View” feature

One thing to keep in mind is that this is a site level feature. So turning it off for the site in question will not turn it off for the sub-sites or any other sites in your environment.

Besides the above method that I recommend, their are other ways of accomplishing this such as the following:

  1. Use PowerShell to turn it off on all existing sites (Limitation: Only works on existing sites)
  2. Use Devise Channels (Limitation: Only works in publishing sites)
  3. Disable the default mobile redirect behavior in the App_Browsers\compat.browser file for the IIS Website for your SharePoint web application (Limitation: Only works on-prem – not in SharePoint Online)

I hope the above is useful for someone. Time to get back to speaker selections for SharePoint Saturday Pittsburgh 🙂

Posted in Quick Tips, SharePoint 2013, SharePoint Online | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Community Portal and Custom Master Page – Solved!

Posted on May 16, 2016 by Gaurav Mahajan

Working with SharePoint has it’s Aha moments! And when you work on multiple consulting projects as an Infrastructure Architect, Information Architect and Developer all in one, trust me you come across a lot of them 🙂 One such moment was on a SharePoint 2013 Intranet roll out that I’ve been working on.

One of the key aspects of an intranet  roll out is its Branding. Among other things, the branding minimally involves a color scheme, standard fonts, a logo and/ or a company banner. More often than not, it also involves applying a custom master page to incorporate such branding elements. COmpared to it’s predecessor, SharePoint 2013 has simplified the process quite a bit with a unified seatle.master being used as a common master page across most site templates (to be honest I haven’t had the chance to verify all templates yet and have so far not found a resource that points me to such a list). So naturally based on this understanding, I was hoping for the SharePoint 2013 Community Portal to work just fine with my custom master page (which was based on seattle.master). Only that it does not (Aha moment #1 :)).

A little bit of looking around revealed that the home page of the Community portal was still the primitive default.aspx. Looking at the page through SharePoint designer revealed that the master page for the page was set to the seattle.master (Aha moment #2):
Seattle.master

So the obvious and quickest approach would be to use SharePoint designer to customize the default.aspx except that I would not recommend it for the following reasons:

  1. SharePoint Designer customizations should be avoided as much as possible for multiple reasons that go beyond the scope of this post and
  2. Even if you customized default.aspx to point to a different master page, you would receive multiple errors (which by the way, even if you resolve will still not help in bringing a lot of branding over)  since the page has primitive markup in it 😐 which will not work with the newer master pages

The solution to the problem is rather a multi step approach:

  1. Browse to the Community Portal & Edit the default.aspx page using the browser
    EditPage
  2. Export the only web part on the page. Just so you know, this web part is actually a Search Results web part that has its query set to fetch only results where the Web Template is a community web site:ExportWebPart
  3. Next, go to the Site Features and Activate the Wiki Home Page feature:
    WikiHomePage.png
  4. This will create the “Site Pages” library in your site and change the home page of your site to “SitePages/Home.aspx”
  5. You will now see that the custom master page that you applied to your site will be applied to this page as well
  6. Finally, you will want to Edit the page and add it to this page:
    UploadWebPartAddWebPart

That’s it. You should now be able to see your community portal in all it’s beauty! I could not find an online resource that pointed me in the right direction as far as this issue goes so thought will create one in the hope that it benifits someone!

Posted in Branding, SharePoint 2013 | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Prerequisites for my workshop/ session on Creating your own SharePoint 2013 VM, Live!

Posted on October 14, 2014 by Gaurav Mahajan

I am truly excited & honored to be speaking at the SharePoint Saturday events. As the name suggests, these are whole day events held on Saturdays and are free for you to attend. There are multiple sessions being held at a time with a whole lot of SharePoint awesomeness going on throughout the day. The sessions are targeted at audience ranging from IT Pros and Developers to End users and vary in complexity from simple to advance level. You can view the session schedule and a list of speakers for your city by browsing to the SharePoint Saturday events site here

The topic of my session at these events is: “Workshop: Create your own SharePoint 2013 dev./ test VM, Live!“. As the session title mentions, I demonstrate how to create a SharePoint 2013 dev./ test VM from scratch using a single click PowerShell script that employs industry defined best practices to not only install SharePoint but also prepare the server for the installation. The session also encourages you to create your own VM alongside if you’d like to. You will need the following tools and software to be able to do so:

  1. Downloads:
    1. VMWare Player 6.0 (free): This is the virtualization tool that we will use for our demo. You can download the free VMWare Player from this link. This is the virtualization tool I will be using for the demo but please feel free to use another tool of your choice (VMWare Workstation/ Hyper-V/ Virtual Box etc.).
    2. ISO of Win Server 2012 R2 Eval: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/dn205286.aspx OR a licensed version of the OS that you might have access to.  Note that even though the software selection drop down on the download page mentions the Windows Server Datacenter edition, it really has other editions bundled into it as well. We will be able to select the edition we want to use at the time of the installation.
    3. SQL Server 2014 Eval ISO available here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/dn205290.aspx  OR a licensed version of SQL that you might have access to (either SQL Server 2012 SP1 OR SQL Server 2014 will be fine – though we will be using SQL Server 2014 for the live demo)
    4. The software and script package through my drive here: This package contains:
      1. Additional software necessary for the installation including the following:
        1. SharePoint Server 2013 prerequisites
        2. SharePoint Server 2013 with SP1: Unfortunately there’s no other link for the trial version of SharePoint 2013 with SP1 that I can share with you. You can also download the installation media using your subscription benefits from the subscriber downloads site using your VLSC, MSDN and MPN benefits and replace the file in my downloads with your own copy.
        3. SharePoint 2013 November 2014 CU (Optional)
      2. The scripts package that we will use to carry out the installations
    5. Finally, as mentioned above, I would like to show you how to create a Windows Server 2012 R2 VM during the session. However an hour will not be sufficient for us to go through the complete Windows installation. As a bonus therefore, I have also uploaded an image of the Windows Server 2012 R2 Trial VM that you can download here. The files are roughly 4 GB in size. Please ensure that you download all the files and extract the zip archive. Once extracted, you will notice 8 files totaling around 11.2 GB in size.  To download the VM files, you can go with either of the following options:
      1. Add the shared Google drive folder to your Google Drive through the “Add to Drive” button on the top right corner of the page and then use the Google Drive Desktop Client to sync the files to your local computer (recommended) OR
      2. Download the files directly by using the browser “Save target as…” functionality (less recommended)
    6. Please note that while I’ve mentioned eval editions of various software above, you are encouraged to use your own licensed version of the software if you have access to them.
  2. Other host requirements: In addition to the above downloads, you will need to ensure the following on/ for your host machine:
    1. You are able to allocate at least 12 Gb and a recommended of 16 GB of memory to the guest VM that we will be creating. Ideally, that would mean you have at least 16 to 20 GB RAM available on your host. You have at least 50 GB of free space on the disk that will contain the VM (the downloaded VM files included)
    2. Your host should be running on Windows 7 or above (64 bit) and it supports virtualization

Finally, please note that even though we will be going through a SharePoint 2013 installation during our session, the steps will hold equally true for a SharePoint 2010 installation as well.

That’s pretty much it. Please feel free to reach out to me via the comments below or through my twitter handle: @mahajang if I can be of further help. I will also be available after the session to answer your questions and in case you’d like help downloading the files. I’ll look forward to seeing you at the event and I hope you are as excited to be there as I am!

Posted in SharePoint 2010, SharePoint 2013, Speaking, Tools, Virtual Machine | Tagged , , , | 32 Comments

Speaking at SharePoint Saturday Richmond on September 27th 2014

Posted on September 23, 2014 by Gaurav Mahajan

I am truly excited & honored to be speaking at SharePoint Saturday Richmond(SPSRIC) on Saturday, September 20th. Its going to be a great event with lots of SharePoint awesomeness. The list of sessions with the equally awesome speakers is available at this Url: http://www.spsevents.org/city/Richmond/Richmond2014/sessions. There were still a few seats available at the time of writing this blog so I will encourage you to register through this link

The topic of my session is: “Workshop: Create your own SharePoint 2013 dev./ test VM, Live!“. As the session title mentions, I will be demonstrating how to create a SharePoint 2013 dev./ test VM from scratch using a single click PowerShell installation script that employs industry defined best practices to not only install SharePoint but also prepare the server for the installation. In this deep dive session, we will:

  1. Review the steps of creating a new Win Server 2012 R2 VM with the goal of installing SQL and SharePoint on it.
  2. Walk-through and customize the single click scripted installation package that:
    1. Prepares the Windows Server VM created above for the installations
    2. Configures a local Active Directory on the VM
    3. Installs and prepares SQL server 2012/ 2014 for SharePoint 2013 installation
    4. Installs and configures SharePoint 2013 on it
  3. As a bonus, based on interest & time permitting, we will also set up a fresh Win Server 2012 R2 VM from scratch.

The session also encourages you to create your own VM alongside if you’d like to. You will need the following to be able to do so:

  1. Downloads:
    1. VMWare Player 6.0 (free): This is the virtualization tool that we will use for our demo. You can download the free VMWare Player from: https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/free#desktop_end_user_computing/vmware_player/6_0 Please however feel free to use the virtualization tool of your choice.
    2. ISO of Win Server 2012 R2 Eval: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/dn205286.aspx
      Note that even though the software selection drop down on the download page mentions the Windows Server Datacenter edition, it really has other editions bundled into it as well. We will be able to select the edition we want to use at the time of the installation.
    3. SQL Server 2014 Eval ISO available here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/dn205290.aspx  OR a licensed version of SQL that you might have access to (either SQL Server 2012 SP1 OR SQL Server 2014 will be fine – though we will be using SQL Server 2014 for the live demo)
    4. SharePoint Server 2013 prerequisites: These are available through my Google drive here
    5. SharePoint Server 2013 with SP1: You can download it using your subscription benefits from the subscriber downloads site using your VLSC, MSDN and MPN benefits. Unfortunately there’s no link for the trial version of SharePoint 2013 with SP1 that I can share with you.
    6. SharePoint 2013 September 2014 CU (Optional): During the session, I will also show you how to bundle updates into you SharePoint 2013 installation. This is a completely optionally step and I’ll recommend that you download the extracted files for the CU from my drive here if you’d like to patch your SharePoint instance to the September 2014 CU patch level too. This is a completely optional step but will save you from having to apply a bunch of SharePoint updates later on.
    7. Classic Shell to enable the start menu on Windows Server 2012 available here (recommended but not required): http://www.classicshell.net/downloads/
    8. The scripts package available through my Google drive here. This package contains the following scripts:
      1. SharePoint 2013 Service Accounts Creator: http://sp2013serviceaccount.codeplex.com/
      2. AutoSPInstaller: http://autospinstaller.codeplex.com/
      3. AutoSPSourceBuilder: https://autospsourcebuilder.codeplex.com/
      4. AutoSPInstallerGUI: http://autospinstallergui.codeplex.com/
    9. Finally, as mentioned above, we will create a Windows Server 2012 R2 VM during the session. As a bonus though, I have also uploaded an image of the Windows Server 2012 R2 Trial VM that you can download here. Please ensure that you download all the files and extract the zip archive. Once extracted, you will notice 8 files totaling around 16.3 GB in size.  To download the VM files, you can go with either of the following options:
      1. Add the shared Google drive folder to your Google Drive through the “Add to Drive” button on the top right corner of the page and then use the Google Drive Desktop Client to sync the files to your local computer (recommended) OR
      2. Download the files directly by using the browser “Save target as…” functionality (less recommended)
    10. Please note that while I’ve mentioned eval editions of various software above, you are encouraged to use your own licensed version of the software if you have access to them.
  2. Other host requirements: In addition to the above downloads, you will need to ensure the following on/ for your host machine:
    1. You have VMWare workstation 9.0.3 or above OR VMWare Player 6.0 (free) OR another virtualization tool installed on your machine. The VMWare tools will be helpful if you are planning to follow along. But please feel free to use a virtualization tool of your choice.
    2. You are able to allocate at least 12 Gb and a recommended of 16 GB of memory to the guest VM that we will be creating. Ideally, that would mean you have at least 16 to 20 GB RAM available on your host
    3. You have at least 50 GB of free space on the disk that will contain the VM (the downloaded VM files included)
    4. Your host should be running on Windows 7 or above (64 bit) and it supports virtualization

That’s pretty much it. Please feel free to reach out to me via the comments below or through my twitter handle: @mahajang if I can be of further help. I will also be available after the session to answer your questions and in case you’d like help downloading the files. I’ll look forward to seeing you @SPSRIC and I hope you are as excited to be there as I am!

Posted in SharePoint 2013, Speaking, Virtual Machine | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Speaking at SharePoint Saturday New Jersey on September 20th 2014

Posted on September 14, 2014 by Gaurav Mahajan

I am truly excited & honored to be speaking at SharePoint Saturday New Jersey (SPSNJ) on Saturday, September 20th. Its going to be a great event with lots of SharePoint awesomeness. The list of sessions with the equally awesome speakers is available at this Url: http://www.spsevents.org/city/NJ/NJ2014/sessions. There were still a few seats available at the time of writing this blog so I will encourage you to register through this link

The topic of my 10:45 AM session will be: “Workshop: Create your own SharePoint 2013 dev./ test VM, Live!“. As the session title mentions, I will be demonstrating how to create a SharePoint 2013 dev./ test VM from scratch. The steps that I will demonstrate will involve creating a Windows Server 2012 R2 VM and configuring a single click installation PowerShell script that employs industry defined best practices to not only install SharePoint but also prepare the VM for the installation. In this deep dive session, we will:

  1. Go through the hands-on of creating a new dev. VM with Windows Server 2012 R2 from scratch
  2. Do a walk-through of the single click script and package that will:
    1. Prepare the VM created above for installations
    2. Configure a local Active Directory on the VM
    3. Install and prepare SQL server 2012/ 2014 for SharePoint 2013 installation
    4. Install and configure SharePoint 2013 on it
    5. Finally, as part of this walk-through we will also customize the different scripts so you can walk away not only with your own Windows Server 2012 VM but also with a ready to run single click SharePoint Server 2013 installation package customized to suite your individual needs.

The session also encourages you to create your own VM alongside if you’d like to. You will need the following to be able to do so:

  1. Downloads:
    1. VMWare Player 6.0 (free): This is the virtualization tool that we will use for our demo. You can download the free VMWare Player from: https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/free#desktop_end_user_computing/vmware_player/6_0 Please however feel free to use the virtualization tool of your choice.
    2. ISO of Win Server 2012 R2 Eval: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/dn205286.aspx
      Note that even though the software selection drop down on the download page mentions the Windows Server Datacenter edition, it really has other editions bundled into it as well. We will be able to select the edition we want to use at the time of the installation.
    3. SQL Server 2014 Eval ISO available here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/dn205290.aspx  OR a licensed version of SQL that you might have access to (either SQL Server 2012 SP1 OR SQL Server 2014 will be fine – though we will be using SQL Server 2014 for the live demo)
    4. SharePoint Server 2013 prerequisites: These are available through my Google drive here
    5. SharePoint Server 2013 with SP1: You can download it using your subscription benefits from the subscriber downloads site using your VLSC, MSDN and MPN benefits. Unfortunately there’s no link for the trial version of SharePoint 2013 with SP1 that I can share with you.
    6. SharePoint 2013 September 2014 CU (Optional): During the session, I will also show you how to bundle updates into you SharePoint 2013 installation. This is a completely optionally step and I’ll recommend that you download the extracted files for the CU from my drive here if you’d like to patch your SharePoint instance to the September 2014 CU patch level too. This is a completely optional step but will save you from having to apply a bunch of SharePoint updates later on.
    7. Classic Shell to enable the start menu on Windows Server 2012 available here (recommended but not required): http://www.classicshell.net/downloads/
    8. The scripts package available through my Google drive here. This package contains the following scripts:
      1. SharePoint 2013 Service Accounts Creator: http://sp2013serviceaccount.codeplex.com/
      2. AutoSPInstaller: http://autospinstaller.codeplex.com/
      3. AutoSPSourceBuilder: https://autospsourcebuilder.codeplex.com/
      4. AutoSPInstallerGUI: http://autospinstallergui.codeplex.com/
    9. Finally, as mentioned above, we will create a Windows Server 2012 R2 VM during the session. As a bonus though, I have also uploaded an image of the Windows Server 2012 R2 Trial VM that you can download here. Please ensure that you download all the files and extract the zip archive. Once extracted, you will notice 8 files totaling around 16.3 GB in size.  To download the VM files, you can go with either of the following options:
      1. Add the shared Google drive folder to your Google Drive through the “Add to Drive” button on the top right corner of the page and then use the Google Drive Desktop Client to sync the files to your local computer (recommended) OR
      2. Download the files directly by using the browser “Save target as…” functionality (less recommended)
    10. Please note that while I’ve mentioned eval editions of various software above, you are encouraged to use your own licensed version of the software if you have access to them.
  2. Other host requirements: In addition to the above downloads, you will need to ensure the following on/ for your host machine:
    1. You have VMWare workstation 9.0.3 or above OR VMWare Player 6.0 (free) OR another virtualization tool installed on your machine. The VMWare tools will be helpful if you are planning to follow along. But please feel free to use a virtualization tool of your choice.
    2. You are able to allocate at least 12 Gb and a recommended of 16 GB of memory to the guest VM that we will be creating. Ideally, that would mean you have at least 16 to 20 GB RAM available on your host
    3. You have at least 50 GB of free space on the disk that will contain the VM (the downloaded VM files included)
    4. Your host should be running on Windows 7 or above (64 bit) and it supports virtualization

That’s pretty much it. Please feel free to reach out to me via the comments below or through my twitter handle: @mahajang if I can be of further help. I will also be available after the session to answer your questions and in case you’d like help downloading the files. I’ll look forward to seeing you @SPSNJ and I hope you are as excited to be there as I am!

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