Commissioning the CMS Silicon Strip Tracker prior to Operations with Cosmic Ray Muons

During autumn 2008, the Silicon Strip Tracker was operated with the full CMS experiment in a comprehensive test, in the presence of the 3.8~T magnetic field produced by the CMS superconducting solenoid. This note details the detector commissioning phase just prior to this data-taking exercise and the procedures used to optimise the performance of the Silicon Strip Tracker. The number of detector modules used during the test corresponds to 98.0\% of the total system. The ten million channels of the SST readout system were calibrated and synchronised with cosmic ray muon data using automated procedures. Excellent hit and track reconstruction efficiencies were observed, which demonstrate the quality of the SST detector and the precision of the calibration procedures.