One of the things I’m doing to dig into the SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 bits is build a Windows Server 2008 R2 build and installing everything on it. Over the course of this build, I’ve come across a few things that others might find useful.
First of all, I’m doing this on my laptop (another server soon too, but for now, the laptop). I’ve currently got a Dell Latitude D820 with 4 GB of RAM – though not all the RAM is fully used due to hardware constraints. In order to keep my normal work environment available, I’m using a second hard drive in the CD (modular) drive bay using a hard drive caddy.
So #1 that I ran into today was trying to use PowerPoint 2010 to work on a slide deck. For the life of me I couldn’t get the file to open. I don’t know if this is only a Server 2008 R2 feature, but the file was blocked – I couldn’t open it in PowerPoint. PowerPoint just sat there and spun until I cancelled it. If you right-click on the file name (once it’s saved locally) and select Properties, you’ll see a Security blurb at the bottom of the General tab. By clicking the Unblock button, you’ll be able to open the file as you normally would.
Oh, I suppose this is #1.5. Not sure what the deal here is, but when I save something from a SharePoint site down to my local machine, it’s changing the file name by filling in the blanks with underscores. I’ll take a peek at this one later – it’s not stopping me from getting my work done.
#2 Was trying to Run OneNote to take notes, etc while running through things. Ran into “OneNote cannot start because the Desktop Experience feature is not installed. Install it in the Windows Control Panel > Programs and Features > Turn Windows features on or off.” That pretty much says what you need to figure it out.
So open the Control Panel. Under Programs there is a ‘Turn Windows features on or off’. This opens the Server Manager. Scroll down to the Features area and select Add Features. Select Desktop Experience. This will require you to also install Ink and Handwriting – go for it. Run through the install wizard for these and you should be good to go. This does require a reboot.
Note: Using the extra drive caddy, or at least different drive partitions for the separate OSs allows me to have a OneNote file that I can open up and use on either machine/OS. I can take my notes and capture screen shots in OneNote while working in Server 2008 and then access those notes just as easily on my Windows 7 machine.
