SharePoint 2010 : Operations Management with the SharePoint Central Administration Tool (part 2) - Administering System Setting Tasks in SPCA

Administering System Setting Tasks in SPCA

The System Setting page, shown in Figure 9, consolidates tasks related to servers and the farm. This page is often referenced while setting up the infrastructure components of a farm during the initial configuration.

Figure 9. Viewing the system settings area of SPCA.

Servers

The first category on the page deals specifically with the servers used by SharePoint and includes the following links:

• Manage servers in this farm— Simply lists the servers in the farm, as shown in Figure 10, and which services they have running. This area also enables the removal of a specific server from the farm.

  Figure 10. Managing servers in a farm.

  

• Manage services on server— This link takes you to the same services view as is linked to from the Application Management area of SPCA. It enables modification of individual service settings, and for starting and stopping services on individual servers.

Within the second category on the System Settings page, labeled E-Mail and Text Messages (SMS), all tasks related to messaging in the new environment, including outbound and inbound email to SharePoint, are displayed. This particular area includes the following links:

• Configure outgoing email settings— Enable an SMTP server to be defined that will be used to forward alerts and other emails to end users. The SMTP server must be configured to accept connections and allow relaying from the SharePoint server.

• Configure incoming email settings— Enables mail to be received directly by the SharePoint server and delivered into email-enabled distribution lists and email-enabled discussion groups.
  

• Configure mobile account— If using a web-based text messaging service, it can be configured within this area of SPCA. This allows for monitoring alerts to be generated even if an outage in the email platform occurs.

Farm Management

Within the third category on the System Settings page, labeled Farm Management, tasks related to functions that apply to all servers in the farm are listed. These include the following:

• Configure alternate access mappings— Link to the same Alternate Access Mapping (AAM) list that the Application Management area linked to. AAMs define how links are translated when users access SharePoint using a specific FQDN, such as https://sharepoint.companyabc.com or http://sharepoint.

• Manage farm features— Enables specific farm features, such as the ones shown in Figure 11, to be turned on or off. It is the first area that should be referenced when trying to determine why a feature doesn’t show up as an available option within a SharePoint site.

  Figure 11. Managing farm features.

  

• Manage farm solutions— List any custom solutions, such as third-party products, which are added into the farm.

• Manage user solutions— Although not obvious from the title of its link, this area allows management of sandbox solutions and enables administrators to define whether specific solutions are blocked for end users.

• Configure privacy options— Private settings, such as whether to sign up for the Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP) or error reporting that is sent to Microsoft is defined in this area of SPCA. This area also enables administrators to define whether external web-based help is available for users within sites.

• Configure cross-firewall access zone— Defines which zone generates URLs that are generated when alerts and other messages are sent from the web application. For example, any administrator can define that all URLs are generated from the Internet zone settings, which have a URL of https://sharepoint.companyabc.com.