A. You must have a license key provided to you by NewsGator support. It is most convenient to store this license key on the SharePoint Central Administration server before you begin.

You must acquire installation files from NewsGator. The WSPs for each module to be installed has to be added to the Solutions folder before you can install.

For full details on what WSPs you'll need, see Validating Setup Folder section in Steps before installing, upgrading, or repairing social sites.

You need to know which servers in your farm are serving as web front ends. This is so that you can stop the NewsGator “Services on Server” on each of them once installation is complete, via Central Administration. This is necessary to have them behaving as true web front ends. (These services are called “NewsGator Social Application Services” and “NewsGator Social Platform Services v2”.)

If upgrading from a previous version of Social Sites, NewsGator recommends at a minimum that you back up the NewsGator databases first (a better option is to back up SharePoint as described in the section Backing Up SharePoint, below).

To prevent interaction occurring with these databases while they are backed up, deactivate NewsGator jobs and stop NewsGator services first.

Detailed steps for doing this are as follows:

Step 1: Deactivate all NG jobs farm features:

1. From Central Administration, click Manage farm features (in the System Settings section).
2. Deactivate the NewsGator Jobs Feature. This shuts off the core NewsGator jobs.
3. If they exist, deactivate the NewsGator Knowledge Explorer Jobs feature and the NewsGator News Stream Jobs feature. (Do not deactivate the NewsGator Social Service Installer or NewsGator News Stream Installer features.)
4. From Central Administration, click Check job status (in the Monitoring section)
5. In the left navigation, click Job Definitions.
6. Open up any remaining NewsGator jobs listed here, and disable each.

Step 2: Stop NewsGator services:

1. From Central Administration, click "Manage services on server" (in the System Settings section)
2. Stop all NewsGator services.

Step 3: Backup NG databases

If your NetBIOS name is different from the fully-qualified domain name (FQDN), your SharePoint 2010 installation has some problems, and Social Sites has difficulty installing, unless you enable the User Profile Service Application to support NetBIOS name resolution. For further details, see SharePoint 2010 Communities FAQ for more details.

At this time it is unknown whether this same problem occurs with SharePoint 2013.

The following PowerShell script enables NetBIOS name resolution on the Service Application:

If you are installing the optional Video Module, there are some preliminary steps you'll need to take before running the installer, including choosing a video server, choosing the location of the Video Stream module database, and choosing locations for the Video Stream services to use for storing videos in different stages of the encoding process.

Specific items of information you'll need to proceed with running the Social Sites installer are:

• Video Stream database server
• Video Stream database name
• Folder to store videos waiting to be encoded
• Folder to store videos upon completion of encoding
• Folder from which to stream completed videos
• Folder to store uploaded files
• URL for the streaming server

For more detail on making these entries, see the Module Options screen section.

If you are installing in a multi-farm environment, you must choose one farm to be the parent farm on which all services run. The remaining farms are child farms.

Advice on how to choose a farm to be the parent, and instructions on how to set up these roles, are contained in the topic Installing to a multi-farm environment. There you can also find steps to take during and after installation of Social Sites to a multi-farm environment.