After creating the Search Center web application, we need to make a few changes to the settings. You may also want to test your "My Site" searching while you're here.

When doing searches for people or across all site collections, a search center is necessary. The following steps detail creating a Search Center with Tabs. Since a Search Center is a type of Enterprise site collection, I chose to make a separate web application dedicated to enterprise sites.

Having a Shared Services Provider is extremely important, but most users won't navigate to that web application. The exception would be the My Site web application that was created at the same time (the My Site web application along with its configuration is managed through the Shared Services Provider). The most tangible web application for users would be a Portal. This could be for Collaboration or Publishing.

Many services are managed through a Shared Services Provider (SSP). Typically search and MySite settings are configured in an SSP. A farm may have multiple SSPs and a single SSP can be utilized by several farms.

In order for MOSS to host site collections or Shared Service Providers, you need to tell IIS to host these services. For example, users will navigate to a domain name and port number along to access a web application. Each web application has an associate application pool, authentication method, and one or more content databases.

Every server within the SharePoint farm can be configured to server various roles such as Index (i.e. crawls content), Query (i.e. runs user search queries), Excel (i.e. Excel Calculation Services [ECS]), etc. There are numerous ways to assign roles to servers, but for this installation, all MOSS services will run on a single VM.

As we mentioned earlier, it is often best to have a security group that is designated as the SharePoint Administrator. You can always set multiple users for this, however.

1. Log into the MOSS2007 VM as the svMOSSSetup service account.
2. Launch the Central Administration site (i.e. Start > All Programs > Microsoft Office Server > SharePoint 3.0 Central Administration).

It seems like a good time to pause and understand some of what has happened so far and the current state of the farm. It will be impossible to understand everything in summary format so the following is a short list of interesting pieces of information.

• The svFarm service account has been granted the dbcreator and securityadmin Server roles in SQL. This is one of the reasons why we have a separate service account from the one used to install MOSS (i.e.

It's now time to configure your MOSS VM's initial settings including authentication and database.

1. Log into the MOSS2007 VM as the svMOSSSetup account.
2. Launch the SharePoint Configuration Wizard (i.e. Start > All Programs > Microsoft Office Server > SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard).
3. On the Welcome screen, click the "Next" button.
   1. A dialog box will be displayed.

There are a few items that need to be configured in the SQL server before you configure MOSS.

1. Log into the SQL2005 VM as the domain administrator.
2. Launch the SQL Server Configuration Manager.
   1. Under the "Network Configuration", select "Protocols"
   2. Double-click "TCP/IP Properties" and change "Enabled" to "Yes"
   3. Click the "OK" button.