There was a time when Microsoft released a beta of something and it worked. It worked well enough that it was pretty usable. I’d been through enough beta programs to know that by the time MS got to the general beta phase they had pretty much hashed out all of the major issues. I was an official beta tester with Microsoft back in the days when betas weren’t released to the general public. I worked on the likes of Windows 98, 98 SE, ME (blech!), and one of the best OS to come out of Redmond, Windows 2000, then later XP. I worked on a number of books which covered, in one form or another, each of these operating systems, and I think I know Windows pretty well.

There’s another side to Microsoft software, though. That’s the side where those who aren’t fond of Microsoft say something along the lines of “Nothing from Microsoft is any good until version 3.0″. Interestingly enough, there is some good background for this case, and it started with Windows 3.11. Then Windows 95 came out, and it wasn’t any good until Windows 98 SE. The Windows ME came out, and it blew chunks beyond belief, and it skipped a beat and then we got Windows 2000. It doesn’t always work out, but you can see there’s at least some kind of pattern.

Of course, I’m not talking about an OS. I’m talking about… uh… SharePoint. Yeah. I can’t really call it software because its a website thingy, but then its not a website because it has application features. Its supposed to be some sort of workgroup collaboration slash content management system slash web portal type framework thingamabob, but its foundations stem from the hideously awful FrontPage days when Microsoft actually decided to call websites “webs” instead of “sites” since everyone called them “sites” and Microsoft apparently can’t be bothered to talk like that.

This longwinded story curves back around now to unveil the meat of this tale; SharePoint 2010 Beta sucks beans. I’m not kidding. I’m not being flippant. Its some of the worst software I’ve ever seen, and this is supposed to be near final code. I’m frankly shocked, but the other day my partner in crime, Darin, came to me and informed me of the hugely improbable issues he was having testing a deployment of Exchange 2010, and that’s release code!

I’m not going to go into the gory details, but I’ll cover the basics. I grabbed an HP box with an Intel Core 2 Duo x64 CPU, 8GBs of RAM, and a 1TB drive in it, and installed the x64 version of Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition on it. Though I find some of the administration choices MS made in 08R2 a little weird and needlessly cumbersome, I’m liking it overall. I then fetched the installer for SharePoint 2010 Beta from my TechNet account and loaded it up.

Like a number of complex applications Microsoft builds, SharePoint 2010′s installer includes the prerequisites autoconfiguration tool. I’ve used them before in SharePoint 2007 and several iterations of SQL Server. In all of those cases, the setup of the prerequisites worked out peachy. It seemed the same with SP2010, but it was not meant to be. It installed .NET 3.5 and SQL Server and a bunch of other stuff I didn’t bother myself to find out about, and it seemed to put it all together rather nicely.

I was wrong.

The first time around, I thought it had worked, but when I couldn’t connect to the DC or add users from the AD, I knew something was wrong. I ticked off the usual suspects; I verified that I had, indeed, bound the host to the domain and that DNS was working just fine, then I went in to check on IIS. It was reporting an error. I did some reading and discovered that I hadn’t run the configuration wizard, so I ran that. It failed. I made some changes and modified some application pool permissions based on someone’s suggestions. That didn’t work, either.

I ran the repair routine on SharePoint, and that seemed to fix something and the IIS error went away. I made some changes, and rebooted, and a new error appeared in IIS, this time with the WAS component. I removed SharePoint. I reinstalled it. That didn’t work. I removed SPS and SQL and turned off the .NET 3.5 role and reinstalled everything. That didn’t work. I removed the IIS role and installed it manually before installing SPS. That didn’t work, either, and all of these later renditions of SPS worked less than the first installation. Finally, I figured that the box had a bad install, so I flattened it and installed WS08R2x64 from scratch on a clean volume.

Surprise of all surprises… that didn’t work.

So, if you’re looking to SharePoint 2010 Beta as something cool to jump into and run test deploys, think again. I didn’t even bother testing a migration, since the basic, default, unmodified install was took broken to work. I followed all of the rules, and it refused to work at all except for half a day at the very beginning where I thought it was working, but them later discovered the user issues. I won’t even bother talking about that since there’s no point getting you interested in something that will likely break the moment you lay eyes on it.

I’d say something like Buyer Beware, but you can’t even buy it yet.

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