Configuring SharePoint products

The SharePoint Products Configuration Wizard performs the following configuration tasks:

• Configures database access and create configuration and admin content databases. In a Standalone installation, SQL Server Express 2008 is installed and configured.
• Installs and configures features and services.
• Configures security.
• Creates sample data.

 Note   The time that is taken to complete each configuration task varies.

If the configuration wizard encounters an error while executing a configuration task, the wizard does not perform any additional configuration tasks. The Configuration Complete page appears with a configuration failure message and a link to the log file that you can use to troubleshoot the issue that caused the failure.

If you cancel the configuration wizard, the configuration tasks that have completed are not undone; the remaining configuration tasks must be performed to complete the deployment of the server. To perform the remaining configuration tasks, you must run the configuration wizard again later.

Running the upgrade checker tool

If you are performing an upgrade, it is recommended that you first use the upgrade checker tool to scan your sites. The upgrade checker tool should be run on each farm machine that has SharePoint installed.

 Note   You must be a member of the Administrators group on the local computer to run this tool.

At a command line, change to the following folder on your hard disk: %COMMONPROGRAMFILES%\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\bin, and then run the following command to scan a server in your server farm:

stsadm.exe -o preupgradecheck

You must run this tool on every server in your server farm. Running the tool can take several minutes or a few hours depending on the amount of content in your environment.

After the scan has completed, you can view a result file which lists all issues found, and a description of how to fix the issues. The file is located in the %COMMONPROGRAMFILES%\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\LOGS folder. The log files are named in the following format: PreUpgradeCheck_YYYYMMDD-HHMMSS-SSS-random-number.log, where YYYYMMDD is the date and HHMMSS-SSS is the time (hours in 24-hour clock format, minutes, seconds, and milliseconds) and the random number is used to differentiate between possible simultaneous attempts to run the pre-upgrade command.

Upgrading a server farm

If you are upgrading a server farm, you must use the following process:

1. Run Setup, and then run the SharePoint Products Configuration Wizard on the server running SharePoint Central Administration in your farm.
2. When you see the message about running Setup on other servers in the farm, you must run Setup and the SharePoint Products Configuration Wizard on the other servers to get to the same point.
3. When all servers in the farm display the message, return to the first Web server, and then click OK to continue the upgrade process for the first server.
4. After the wizard has completed on the first server, you can configure each of the other servers.

Security account requirements

To deploy SharePoint products in a server farm environment, you will need a user account that you can use to install the product and run the SharePoint Products Configuration Wizard. This account must be a unique domain user account that you can specify as the service account. This user account is used to access your configuration database. The database access account will be used for both initial database configuration, and ongoing connections from servers in this farm to the databases.

 Important   Ensure that your domain does not have group policy that prohibits the account chosen as your database access account from running as a service.