4. Backup and Restore
Backup and Restore is an important process in the operation of your farm. In the event of disaster, a
previous backup and successful restore might be the difference between
continued use of your farm with full data integrity and full/partial
loss of services and data. Figure 6 shows the Backup and Restore section in Central Administration.
SharePoint backup comes in two flavors: farm
and granular (and there is SQL backup for those diehard database
admins). Farm backups allow you to select what parts of your farm you
wish to back up and can consist of the entire farm or a particular
service or content database. Granular backup is essentially site
collection backup and export of sites and lists. SharePoint 2007
provided granular backups via STSADM; since SharePoint 2010,
administrators can perform granular backups from this section of
Central Administration. SharePoint 2013 provides “unattached database
restore,” which essentially means you can restore content to your farm
if you have an offline database file.
5. Security
The Security section in Central
Administration allows you to configure all aspects of security at the
farm level. Typically, one of the most frequented settings in this
section is the setting to manage the farm administrators group. A farm
administrator is the highest level of security a user may obtain, and
with this level of access, a user can perform all operations in the
farm.
The setting to specify user
policy for a web application allows you to grant or deny access
(different permission levels) to users for a given web application. The
same setting exists as an icon in the ribbon on the management page of
a selected web application under Application Management.
User policy for a web application is ideal when
granting user access without needing to add the user as a site
collection administrator in all site collections under a web
application. Figure 7 shows the Security section in Central Administration.
General Security and Information Policy
subsections provide you access to settings for Managed Accounts, managing trust, specifying authentication
providers, anti-virus, web part security, and self-service site
creation (same link as in Application Management). The setting to
configure service accounts is worth an important mention because you
may apply different service accounts to any or all of the service
applications in your farm. When configuring your farm via the farm
wizard, SharePoint uses the same service account for all services,
which you might not desire if you want to secure service applications
differently.
The settings in the subsection for
Information Policy allow you to configure rights management with Active
Directory or RIMS (Rights Information Management Service).
The information management policies allow you to enable available
policies throughout the farm, such as bar codes, retention, Office
document labels, etc.
6. Upgrade and Migration
The Upgrade and Migration section has very
few settings. This section allows you to upgrade the license type of
the farm and take advantage of the enterprise features—you would
provide an enterprise license key and enable the enterprise features if
you had previously installed your farm with a standard license and
wished to upgrade to the enterprise version.
This section also provides a link to determine
the status of database attach upgrades from SharePoint 2010. Figure 8 shows the Upgrade and Migration section in Central Administration.
