The single most important tool to a SharePoint administrator is the SharePoint Central Administration tool (SPCA), shown in Figure 1.
This tool, run on a dedicated IIS virtual server using a unique port
(such as 14199), is installed on the first server in a farm. The tool
can be invoked from the server console from the Start menu or, because
it is web-based and is effectively just a SharePoint site collection
within a dedicated web application, it can be invoked from any
workstation. It is actually preferable from a security perspective to
access the SharePoint Central Administration tool from a different
workstation. If doing so, be sure to note what the hostname and port is
for the SharePoint central web application when created.
Note
Although the default is to
choose a custom port for the SharePoint Central Administration tool, it
is recommended to instead change this to the default HTTPS port of 443,
so that an SSL certificate can be easily added and a unique name for the
SPCA tool can be used. For example, https://spca.companyabc.com
would be an example of a best-practice way of accessing the SharePoint
Central Administration tool from another workstation. This has the added
advantage of enabling SPCA to be easily load balanced using network
load balancing, either hardware-based or software-based, between two
servers running the SPCA service.
The SPCA tool is divided into a home page, shown in Figure 6.1,
which provides a launching point for some of the most commonly used
tasks in SPCA. More detailed sets of tasks can be launched by clicking
the links listed in the left pane of the page. These links take you to
specific pages for each category of administration, including the
following:
Administering Application Management Tasks in SPCA
The Application Management page, shown in Figure 2,
contains those tasks directly related to the management of site
collections, sites, web applications, and service applications. It is
subsequently a page where an administrator can spend a great deal of
time during the initial configuration of SharePoint 2010.
Web Applications
The first category on the page deals specifically with web applications and includes the following links:
Manage Web Applications—
Simply lists the web applications in the farm and their URLs and port.
This area also enables the configuration of various web application
settings.
Configure Alternate Access Mappings— This highly important area controls Alternate Access Mappings (AAM), shown in Figure 3.
AAMs are needed to indicate different server host header values for the
machine. For example, in the diagram, http://intranet is the URL used
to access the server internally, whereas https://sharepoint.companyabc.com
is the URL used for external access. If an AAM is configured,
SharePoint automatically translates all links to the host header value
used by the client to access site content. This reduces the chance of
links not working externally.
Site Collections
Within the second category on
the Application Management page, labeled Site Collections, all the
options for creating, deleting, and managing individual site collections
are listed. Site
collections provide the highest-level administrative object entity
within SharePoint, with the exception of web applications and the farm.
The links provided within the Site Collections category include the
following:
Create site collections— This link allows for the creation of new site collections from within SPCA, as shown in Figure 4.
Site collections can be created from a default list of templates, or
via custom templates created by the organization and added into SPCA
using PowerShell or the STSADM command-line tool.
Delete a site collection—
Enables an administrator to delete specific site collections. Note that
when deleted, it is not easy to recover an entire site collection.
Confirm site use and deletion—
Leads to a page that enables the configuration of automatic site
collection deletion of unused sites. This functionality is meant to help
to control the growth of SharePoint content by removing site
collections no longer in use and enables administrators to define
warnings that are sent to site collection administrators.
Specify quota templates—
Enables administrators to create and modify quota templates for site
collections. Individual size limits can be defined for site collections
and applied to the individual site collections as they are created or at
a later time. Site collection administrators are notified if their
sites grow above a warning limit or if they are above the maximum size
limit, which will result in new content not being added to the site.
Configure quotas and locks— Takes the administrator to settings shown in Figure 5
that define whether a site collection is locked; effectively not
allowing any content to be added because of the result of exceeding a
template or simply because the content was locked into read-only mode
for one reason or another.
Change site collection administrators—
Clicking this link in SPCA enables the administrator to define who the
primary and secondary site collection administrators are for a site
collection.
View all site collections— All site collections within a specific content database can be viewed from within this link.
Configure self-service site creation—
Enables administrators to turn Self-Service Site Creation on or off for
a web application. This concept enables users with the Use Self-Service
Site Creation permission to create sites in defined URL namespaces. Be
cautious when enabling this, because it can lead to a proliferation of
sites within a site collection very quickly.
Service Applications
Within the third category on the
Application Management page, labeled Service Applications, the tasks
related to the critical service applications in SharePoint 2010 can be
modified.
Manage service applications— This link takes administrators to the Service Applications page, shown in Figure 6.
This page is the main administrative point to all the service
applications, such as the Managed Metadata Service, PerformancePoint,
Excel Services, and others.
Configure service application associations—
Configuring service application associations enables them to be “tied”
to an individual web application so that they can be used by the site
collections within those web applications. Administrators can modify
which web applications these service applications are tied to from
within this interface.
Manage services on server— This link takes administrators to the page shown in Figure 7,
which enables individual services to be started or stopped on servers.
Configuration information for those specific services can be accessed by
clicking the blue links for services that enable settings to be
modified.
Databases
Within the fourth category
on the Application Management page, labeled Databases, all the tasks
associated with SharePoint content databases are made accessible. This
includes the following links:
Manage content databases— This link presents a list of all content databases, similar to what is shown in Figure 8. As a side note, by modifying the maximum number
of sites that can be created within a content database, you can control
which content database a site collection is installed in. This can also
be controlled from within PowerShell when creating a site collection.
Specify the default database server—
The default database server used for all new databases can be specified
in this section of SPCA. In addition, if using SQL Server
authentication (not recommended) to connect to the SQL Server, the SA
account and password can be designated here.
Configure the data retrieval service—
Data retrieval services such as OLEDB, SOAP Passthrough, CML-URL, or
SharePoint Foundation can be enabled or disabled on individual web
applications in this area of SPCA.
