Installation Prerequisites

Before Installing ExCM - Prerequisites and Considerations

Before beginning your installation of ExCM 2019, 2016, or 2013 R2, consider each of these items and ensure that the prerequisites have been met:

For ExCM 2013 R2, bring the patch level of your SharePoint farm to SharePoint Service Pack 1, if it is not already at that level. For ExCM 2016 and 2019, a SharePoint RTM installation, or later, for the corresponding version of SharePoint is appropriate.

Obtain the latest build of ExCM 2019, 2016, or 2013 R2 from PremierPoint Solutions software download site. Please contact our Software Sales department to be directed to the download site.

Ensure that you have the appropriate number of license keys for the farm that you will be installing to. Our Software Sales team can assist you with making sure you have the correct number of keys.

If not done yet, decide upon the URL you desire for your extranet web application to use.

Note: we strongly recommend using a single URL for both external and internal access to the extranet web application. This provides for the simplest configuration in SharePoint since only one authentication zone will be required. See this section of our documentation for more details about using a "multi-mode" web application (recommended) vs. an "extended" web application (not recommended).

Obtain a suitable SSL certificate for the URL you have selected.

Make whatever changes are necessary to your internal and external DNS servers so that the URL that you have selected will resolve to your SharePoint web front-end server, or the load balancer that points to your SharePoint web front-end servers.

Confirm that the outbound mail flow (SMTP) from your SharePoint farm is working properly.

If your extranet web application will be hosted in the same SharePoint farm as your Intranet web application, decide what you will do about certain SharePoint Server features that are deployed by default, but are not really designed for use in an extranet scenario. The features are related to user profiles, social networking, and My Sites. Read this article for an in-depth discussion of how these features would be removed from your extranet web application, but remain available for your intranet web application.

Create a new web application and a root site collection that will serve as your extranet web application in your farm. Use the URL you previously selected and add the SSL certificate to the site in IIS Manager. Select Windows Authentication as the authentication provider. Later in this documentation you will configure this new web application specifically for extranet usage.

Use a browser and verify that you can log into the new site collection created in #9, using the Windows credentials of the site collection administrator.

Make sure that you have an account with local administrator permissions that you can use to login to every server in your SharePoint farm. Frequently, this account is referred to as the SharePoint "Install" or "Admin" account.

Make sure that you have the ability to login as an administrator to the SQL Server that the SharePoint Farm uses.

You must install and deploy ExCM 2019, 2016, or 2013 R2 on your Central Administration server AND the Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Web Application service must be started on that server and remain started. To meet this requirement, you can either A) make sure that the Central Administration website is running on a WFE, or B) you can make sure that the Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Web Application service is started on the CA server if it is not a WFE. Go here to learn more about this requirement.

If you would like to test your new extranet web application from the Internet as part of the installation and basic configuration, make sure that the necessary firewall publishing tasks have been done beforehand and that you have access to a firewall engineer for troubleshooting assistance, if necessary.

Once you have met the prerequisites, proceed to the Overview and Step by Step Instructions page.