There are times, when we, as developers, may have several different iterations of SharePoint installations floating around. Maybe we have a staging installation, development installation, and finally a production installation (which may or may not be administered by us ;).

In cases like this, what is the easiest way to find out the version of SharePoint that is running on one of your servers? Well, as most anything in world of technology, there are several ways to accomplish this, surprise huh?.

Method #1. (My preferred way)
One of easier ways I have found is to inspect the HTTP headers when connecting to the site. Now in order to accomplish this you need to use the Firefox browser along with a pretty slick addon called Live HTTP Headers. Below is a screen shot of what a SharePoint admin site looks like with the Live HTTP Headers add on installed. Notice the “MicrosoftSharePointTeamServices” hi-lighted header. Next to this you will see a version number, this tells you the version of SharePoint you are running. Once you have this version number you can match if to the table below that maps this version number to a MOSS/WSS version.

image 

Version HTTP Header MOSS/WSS Version
12.0.0.6303 MOSS 2007 or WSS 3.0 post-SP1 hotfix (KB948945)    
12.0.0.6301 MOSS 2007 or WSS 3.0 post-SP1 hotfix (KB941274)  
12.0.0.6300 MOSS 2007 or WSS 3.0 post-SP1 hotfix (KB941422) 
12.0.0.6219  
MOSS 2007 or WSS 3.0 SP1
12.0.0.6039 MOSS 2007 or WSS 3.0 October public update
12.0.0.6036 MOSS 2007 or WSS 3.0 August 24, 2007 hotfix package 
12.0.0.4518 MOSS 2007 or WSS 3.0 RTM 

 

Method #2.
The second method would be to connect (via RDP or some other type of connection method) and startup IIS. Once the IIS console is running, right click on the site your interested in, select properties. From there go into the HTTP headers tab and look at the header that specified. Once that is done refer to the table above.