Installing SharePoint Foundation 2010 – Standalone

My first installation of SharePoint 2010 will be quite straight forward as it will only consist of a single server and won’t be part of a farm.  This means that I won’t require a Farm Administrator account.

So, once presented with the SharePoint Foundation 2010 splash screen the first thing to do is install the software prerequisites.  This will install a variety of components that are required before installing SharePoint, as shown in the screenshot below.  At this point I needed internet connectivity to download the components.

This process took around 10 minutes and a reboot was required afterwards.  After the reboot setup continues to install components.  The time required will vary depending on server specification and internet connection.

Back at the splash screen the next thing to do is install SharePoint itself.

After accepting the license agreement I have to choose between a Standalone installation or configure a Server Farm.  As this will be the only SharePoint server I have chosen Standalone and SharePoint is being installed.  This took around 8 minutes to complete.  Once closed, the Configuration Wizard runs.

Once the wizard starts I’m told that some services may be restarted afterwards.  This is fine for me as it’s a new server and isn’t doing anything right now.

Setup is now performing various tasks, such as creating the database and creating sample data.  Configuration was complete in around 5 minutes and now SharePoint is ready to use!