The Portal Project:
Recently, I have given a responsibility in my team, along with another colleague, to set up a web portal for my project. I was so excited to take up this, as working with web technologies is always my interest. The internal portal project has started with a kick-off meeting and brain storming. We discussed about available CMS solutions like SharePoint, Drupal, Jooma and possibility of integrating with MS Office applications. Finally we decided to go with SharePoint as we thought integrating SharePoint with Office application will be more easier and flexible than the other CMS platforms.

Problems, Problems and Problems…
I took up the technical part of this project and started my work on installing the SharePoint 2007. The installation was very smooth, as I selected the default settings. Everything went smooth until now. Then started the real-problem. After the installation, SharePoint was asking me to run the configuration wizard for the SharePoint technologies. As, I was a newbie, I knew nothing about how to configure it. Googled for it and found one article on net. Then started the configuration wizard, which had 10 steps. But, for some reason the configuration was failing at the 8th step, in which the wizard was trying to copy the sample data to database. I could not able to find out the exact reason for why it was failing. Even the technical support people at my Company were not able to solve this. They suggested a solution to un-install the entire SharePoint 2007 portal and try re-installing it again. I did it and you know what, I did the uninstall-reinstall operations 6 times. Every time, the configuration wizard was failing at some point or the other.

Downgrading to 2003
Finally gave up with SharePoint 2007 and chose to install SharePoint 2003. Got a new server and did a clean installation of SharePoint 2003. This time I was successful and I was able to create a portal. But then also facing some problems with the web parts. When I opened my portal, all the web parts were showing an error message (oops!). Then googled for it and found an solution. The issue was the SharePoint solution need Service packs to work with the Dot Net framework. So, I installed all the available service packs and now my portal looks fine. But, still have to do lot more customization and integration. So more hurdles to come.