SharePoint 2010: Architecture Fundamentals - Understanding SharePoint Administration

Administration in SharePoint is a set of Web pages that allow both IT pros and business users to configure settings and add new content. In general, administration is broken out by role and grouped by type of task.

There are fundamentally three tiers to SharePoint administration: Central Administration, (which is where all global SharePoint settings are configured), Site Collection administration (with unique settings for each Site Collection), and site-level administration (with unique settings for each site).

Central Administration

There is one Central Administration per farm; it includes settings like topology, security, and application services. For an overview of what the Central Administration site looks like, see Figure 1.

Who? IT Administrators

What? Used for things such as adding a new physical server to the farm or configuring service settings

Where? Farm level

How many? One per farm

Figure 1. The home page of SharePoint Central Administration provides you with the core tasks you’ll need to undertake to get your farm working properly

There is no longer an Operations tab in SharePoint 2010. The main page is broken into eight sections, each of which contains links to pages that help you manage your server or server farm, such as changing the server farm topology, specifying which services are running on each server, and changing settings that affect multiple servers or applications. For example, the System Settings section enables you to manage servers in the farm (see Figure 2).

Figure 2. The System Settings section of SharePoint Central Administration provides physical and logical configuration settings for your farm

Finally, the Application Management page contains links to pages that help you configure settings for Web applications and Site Collections that are on the farm (see Figure 3). Within Application Management is also a section called Service Applications, where service applications are now config-ured (see Figure 4). This section includes administration of user profiles, My Sites, search, usage reporting, audiences, Excel Services, business connectivity services, and the other service applications.

Figure 3. The Application Management section of SharePoint Central Administration provides ways to configure your core application components, such as Web application settings and Site Collection settings

Figure 4. SharePoint Central Administration also gets you to a place where you can administer service applications. This replaces the separate SSP administration site in MOSS 2007.

Site Collection Settings

Administration for a specific Site Collection.

Who? Business user or IT (Site Collection owner)

Where? Every Site Collection

Site Settings

Administration for a specific site.

Who? Business user or IT (site owner)

What? Used for things such as site configuration, creating new lists, adding users to the site, storage, and site hierarchy

Where? Every site

How many? One admin page per site with an extra Column for Site Collection settings for top-level sites

The primary usage of the site settings page(s) is to provide a UI where business users can manage their sites. This includes the site-specific permissions, the look and feel of the site, and miscellaneous site settings (Figure 5). We recommend that business users who will be administering a site get adequate training on the Site Settings pages.

Figure 5. The administration page on a site lets a user (typically the site owner) configure site-specific items, such as site-level permissions, the lists and libraries stored within the site, and the look and feel of the site

As you have seen, the various SharePoint 2010 configuration and administration settings require multiple administrators. You should carefully plan and designate which users should administer which pieces of the SharePoint administration puzzle.