Microsoft Web Platform

Geek Level - 4


I've stumbled upon something today that I think is one of the greatest things I've found in a while. While this post is geared somewhat towards network admins, this is great for teachers who are wanting web 2.0 tools available for them, but due to time restrains, the network admins at their school do not want to setup the tools for them.

The Microsoft web platform is a small application that installs on Windows Server 2008. After this is installed, you have the option of installing some of the Microsoft software that a log of web apps run, but you can also just go directly to installing apps. This will install apps such as Wordpress, Joomla, Wordpress, Drupal and the best one -- Moodle. When I say it will install these apps, it does almost all of it for you, and just prompts you for passwords and such to set. It's one of the greatest things I've seen for a while.

I have setup local versions of Moodle and Wordpress on windows machines in the past. Usually I have to set aside several hours of hunting down the current versions of PHP, Apache if I choose to run it, MySQL and others, install them, configure them, edit .ini files then hope and pray that what I have done will work.

When I went to install Moodle today for a new server I came across the Web Platform. I looked at it and thought that surely it wouldn't work right, but I was wrong. Once I selected Moodle and clicked "Install" it started. I watched it download MYSQL, PHP, and all of the other dependencies that is required. After a while, it prompted me to enter the MYSQL root password, then later on the database usernames and passwords that I wanted to use. That was it. I know this saved me at least two hours, and that is coming from someone who has done this before (albeit a few years ago), if it was my first time I know it would have been much more.

This is a great solution for not only network admins, but since this application installs on Windows systems XP and above, anyone could setup their own local test servers on any machine laying around just to play with some of the new software to see if they wanted to push for a bigger install. If you wanted to try out a local version of WordPress, you could set it up, and have our students access it via the IP address. While I wouldn't recommend that as your final install, it would be a great way to test things out.

If you want to take a look at it, you can check out the page here or just go straight to the download here.