For some reason I can never remember these all so I’m posting here more for my reference than yours but hopefully it will help someone else out.

So, you may be asking…(for example), where the hell did I get STS#0 from?  The answer is pretty easy…

STS = Site Template Name

#0 = Site Template Configuration number.

If you go to your SharePoint 12 hive (C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12) and look at the template folder (C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\TEMPLATE\1033\XML) you’ll see a list of XML files which tell SharePoint what templates are available to it.  Crack open WEBTEMP.XML and take a look and you’ll see all the WSS templates that are available to you.

Here is a snippet of the XML that tells SharePoint about team sites and its various configurations..

<Template Name="STS" ID="1">
    <Configuration ID="0" Title="Team Site" Hidden="FALSE" ImageUrl="/_layouts/images/stsprev.png" 
	Description="A site for teams to quickly organize, author, and share information. It provides a document library, and lists for managing announcements, calendar items, tasks, and discussions." 
	DisplayCategory="Collaboration" >    
    </Configuration>
    <Configuration ID="1" Title="Blank Site" Hidden="FALSE" ImageUrl="/_layouts/images/blankprev.png" 
	Description="A blank site for you to customize based on your requirements."
	DisplayCategory="Collaboration" 
	AllowGlobalFeatureAssociations="False" >    
    </Configuration>
    <Configuration ID="2" Title="Document Workspace" Hidden="FALSE" ImageUrl="/_layouts/images/dwsprev.png" 
	Description="A site for colleagues to work together on a document. It provides a document library for storing the primary document and supporting files, a tasks list for assigning to-do items, and a links list for resources related to the document." 
	DisplayCategory="Collaboration" >    
    </Configuration>
 </Template>

Now if you check back to my list above, I’m sure you can see now how you get STS#0, STS#1 and STS#2.

*** I’ll try and do a SharePoint 2010 comparison to this list above pretty soon.

I’ve been doing SharePoint 2007 silent installs now for quite awhile.  SharePoint 2010 beta is out and I obviously wanted to see if the same files still worked so that I can use the same processes I have in place when I do installs.  Below is what I was using before as my config.xml answer file:

<Configuration>

    <Package Id="sts">

        <Setting Id="LAUNCHEDFROMSETUPSTS" Value="Yes"/>

        <Setting Id="REBOOT" Value="ReallySuppress"/>

        <Setting Id="SETUPTYPE" Value="CLEAN_INSTALL"/>

    </Package>

    <Package Id="spswfe">

        <Setting Id="SETUPCALLED" Value="1"/>

        <Setting Id="REBOOT" Value="ReallySuppress"/>

        <Setting Id="OFFICESERVERPREMIUM" Value="1" />

    </Package>

    <Logging Type="verbose" Path="%temp%" Template="Office Server Setup(*).log"/>

    <Display Level="none" CompletionNotice="Yes" />

    <PIDKEY Value="{MSDN KEY FOR EDITION OF SHAREPOINT 2007}" />

    <Setting Id="SERVERROLE" Value="APPLICATION"/>

    <Setting Id="USINGUIINSTALLMODE" Value="0"/>

</Configuration>

If your not familiar, config.xml comes from the templates that Microsoft gives you in the installer disc.  If you mount the SharePoint 2007 installer disc and dig into the install directory, you’ll see a “Files” directory.  If you poke in there you should see the following:

If you drill into one of those SharePoint 2007 Files folders you’ll find a config.xml file which is the shell of what you’ll need to do a silent install.  Below is what the SetupFarmSilent config.xml looks like

<Configuration>

    <Package Id="sts">

        <Setting Id="LAUNCHEDFROMSETUPSTS" Value="Yes"/>

        <Setting Id="REBOOT" Value="ReallySuppress"/>

        <Setting Id="SETUPTYPE" Value="CLEAN_INSTALL"/>

    </Package>

    <Package Id="spswfe">

        <Setting Id="SETUPCALLED" Value="1"/>

        <Setting Id="REBOOT" Value="ReallySuppress"/>

        <Setting Id="OFFICESERVERPREMIUM" Value="1" />

    </Package>

    <Logging Type="verbose" Path="%temp%" Template="Office Server Setup(*).log"/>

    <Display Level="none" CompletionNotice="no" />

    <PIDKEY Value="Enter PID Key Here" />

    <Setting Id="SERVERROLE" Value="APPLICATION"/>

    <Setting Id="USINGUIINSTALLMODE" Value="0"/>

</Configuration>

The only real difference from the config.xml at the top and the one right above is that I changed CompletionNotice="Yes" which tells the installer to let me know when the install is done.

Ok, so now that your armed with this silent install config file, how do i run it?  Easy!

setup.exe /config c:\{location of your config file}\config.xml

Now your probably asking yourself what’s the story with SharePoint 2010?  Is it the same process or different?

Well, here is what the installer Files directory looks like for SharePoint 2010:

As you can see nothing really different here other than its 1 folder less than the 2007 version, the “SetupFarmSidebySide”.

Here is what the SharePoint 2010 config.xml looks like for the “SetupFarmSilent”

<Configuration>

    <Package Id="sts">

        <Setting Id="LAUNCHEDFROMSETUPSTS" Value="Yes"/>

    </Package>

    <Package Id="spswfe">

        <Setting Id="SETUPCALLED" Value="1"/>

        <Setting Id="OFFICESERVERPREMIUM" Value="1" />

    </Package>

    <Logging Type="verbose" Path="%temp%" Template="SharePoint Server Setup(*).log"/>

    <!--<PIDKEY Value="Enter Product Key Here" />-->

    <Display Level="none" CompletionNotice="no" />

    <Setting Id="SERVERROLE" Value="APPLICATION"/>

    <Setting Id="USINGUIINSTALLMODE" Value="0"/>

    <Setting Id="SETUP_REBOOT" Value="Never" />

    <Setting Id="SETUPTYPE" Value="CLEAN_INSTALL"/>

</Configuration>

Lets compare a 2007 and a 2010 config.xml

The file on the left is the 2007 config.xml and the file on the right is the 2010 config.xml.  As you can see they are basically the same, the only real difference I can see is that the 2010 config.xml moved 1 or 2 of the settings around, but essentially the files contain the same information.

Now that we’ve compared the files, does the same command to setup SharePoint 2007 silently from a config.xml file still work in 2010?

I ran the following command against the SharePoint 2010 installer (after installing all the SharePoint 2010 prereq’s of course.  See http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262485%28office.14%29.aspx).

setup.exe /config c:\{location of customized config}\config.xml

After about 7 or 8 minutes I got the following message back

So as you can see, doing a silent install in SharePoint 2010 is pretty much the same as it was in 2007.  Now that you’ve got SharePoint 2010 installed, its time to do a scripted configuration of the farm.  Look for a blog posting soon on doing so because I’ll be going through the steps personally and will certainly share the info for all.

I’ve been getting a TON of comment spam on my blog the past few months and I’ve kind of let it go.  This week I am going to work on implementing CAPTCHA or something similar to see if I can reduce the spam that I am getting.  Hopefully I haven’t missed anyone’s legit comments that get emailed to me, so if I did, I apologize in advance and will hopefully have it resolved shortly.

This past weekend I presented at the SharePoint Satuday event in Cleveland.  As with all the SharePoint Saturday events, they have gone off pretty smoothly and I was glad that I could be a part of the event.  I got a chance to talk to some of the other speakers as well and met some really cool people out there.

My session was on doing Enterprise development and deployment with SharePoint 2010 and I hope that I was able to pass along some knowledge I’ve gained over the years. 

http://www.sharepointsaturday.org/cleveland/default.aspx

Presentation Link : Code/Slides

I’ll be speaking at SharePoint Saturday Philly and Cleveland coming up here in a few weeks.  My goal is to provide an good demonstration of how to do enterprise level development techniques and deployment with SharePoint 2010.

SharePoint Philly Nov. 7th

SharePoint Cleveland Nov. 14th

If your not familiar with SharePoint Saturdays it is basically an all day code camp (on saturday obviously) but entirely filled with SharePoint sessions.  Oh yeah…did I mention its free?  If you didn’t attend the recent SharePoint conference then this is a great, free, and local chance to get a good deal of the same, if not more helpful, information that was a the conference.  The other point to mention is that these code camps will be focusing more on SharePoint 2010 but will still have some SharePoint 2007 sessions.