This morning I finished building the WSS Webserver we will use to build our intranet on. To be fair, it was very straight forward and did not gave me any issues aside form the speed, as I was working on a VM copy of the real server.
I made a virtual copy of the live server, to do a test run of the set-up. I used the VMware converter which is simple to use, and gives me an exact copy of the live server. I used this to complete the setup and configuration. This way, if any problems appear, I am aware of them and can prevent them from occurring on the live machine.
I did however encounter one small issue, which is completely my “fault”. I did not check in advance how to set up the email configuration for outgoing and incoming mail. The server is a standalone installation, not part of a farm, and I believe the WSS server, although standalone, should be able to benefit from the UK exchange environment for the mailing purposes.
Another thing I now have to have a look at is the way we will “upload” the custom applications we will be building. My best guess is that we will set up a site in IIS for each which we will link to from within the WSS site. However, I would have to have a look on how this can be done. Shared folder, Frontpage extensions, don’t know yet. We will be developing in wither visual studio, or on the VS Web developer express edition, and I’m not 100% sure what is the best way to publish the applications we build in there.
