Test SharePoint Sites

Question

I have started working on sharepoint. Other than playing around with the development sites in office I would also like to learn from home. I dont have MOSS 2007 server or Windows 2003 box to install MOSS.Are there are any public sharepoint sites (free or registered) where I can create and test out sites?

Answer 1

Microsoft provides Virtual Labs which hopefully will suffice. Apart from that the trials and virtual machines that others have mentioned are the only way.

MOSS costs in licensing (esp. for public web sites), server power and database storage. So it's not in many companies interest to provide a free test bed, really only Microsoft's.

Answer 2

Download virtual PC from mirosoft

then run a sharepoint VPC from here http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/bb738372.aspx or build your own one.

Answer 3

You can install MOSS or WSS (the baseline package) on Vista or Windows 7 but it's officially unsupported, however it works perfectly IMO.

See:

• http://community.bamboosolutions.com/blogs/bambooteamblog/archive/2008/05/21/how-to-install-windows-sharepoint-services-3-0-sp1-on-vista-x64-x86.aspx

and download a 180-day trial version of WSS 3.0 from:

• https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=ef93e453-75f1-45df-8c6f-4565e8549c2a

Additionally, remember that most of the technology in WSS is built on plain ASP.NET 2.0 (things like webparts work pretty much identically)

-Oisin