Windows Sharepoint Services SP1 on Exchange 2003

This weekend, I was playing around yet more with my home infrastructure, "dogfooding", so to speak. One of the things I wanted to get running was Windows Sharepoint Services SP1 (the baby brother of Sharepoint Portal Server). However, I've pretty much run out of memory on my struggling servers here to be able to rack up another VM, hence, I picked on my Exchange 2003 SP1 server which has got IIS already installed. I obviously made sure I had a backup of it first (which is easy given it's a VM, and yes, I know it's not a supported configuration) in case things were to by any chance go wrong.

Well, things did go wrong - however the information was all there in the readme. Essentially, when opening Outlook Web Access, you get a page not found error as the ISAPI filter for Sharepoint is sucking all the requests made to it (that's not the official term though ;-). The solution (which although hard to follow does work exactly as it says) is documented in KB 823265. Note however that you'll also need to setup Sharepoint Services to use Kerberos authentication as documented in KB 832769.

Even though I got things working fine, my poor old server just couldn't hack the extra load by the time SQL went onto it running in a VM. Hence, I ended up reverting back to my original VM with just Exchange 2003 on it, and popped off to eBay to look for an cheap extra GB or two of ram. That should be enough for at least one seperate VM running the full blown sharepoint portal server, and if I tune it down enough, I should just about be able to squeeze another VM with Live Communications Server on it as well. Afterall, don't you have a full blown SIP service at your home? Nah, I think it's just me. I might have to wait until I can persuade the home "bean-counter" that we really need a twin CPU x64 servers - one of those new dual-core AMD chips are getting great reviews.

Here's the download link to Windows Sharepoint Services SP1.