Appendix A. Setting up a test environment
This appendix covers
In this appendix we’ll walk through the steps to set up a nonproduction environment of SharePoint on Windows 7 or Vista. You can then use this environment to experiment with the scenarios in the chapters.
In the book, we’ll go through step-by-step scenarios allowing you to experiment and learn how to configure and customize your SharePoint sites. Having a SharePoint environment to do this in is critical. Historically, experimenting was difficult to do because SharePoint prior to the 2010 release wouldn’t run on a PC operating system. Now the Share-Point team has made it much easier to set up a test environment, and you can install and configure SharePoint Foundation or SharePoint Server on Windows Vista or 7. I look forward to walking you through the steps so you can have your own personal playground on which to learn Share-Point! This will give you your own development environment, so you won’t have to rely on someone else’s installation. This is also a good exercise to begin learning the configuration and installation aspects of SharePoint.