If you read the previous sections of this
chapter, you will already have seen references to the SharePoint
Central Administration web site (Central Administration for short). I
previously glossed over the use of Central Administration, so now shall
take you on a more extensive tour.
Simply put, the Central Administration web site is the graphical user interface to management of a SharePoint 2013 farm. Figure 1 shows the opening Central Administration home page, familiar to any administrator who has installed SharePoint 2013
The Central Administration
interface is not the only means to administer SharePoint 2013.
Microsoft provides a whole bunch of PowerShell Cmdlets to script
SharePoint administration. Users who administered SharePoint 2007 may remember the STSADM tool,
which Microsoft now considers legacy. SharePoint 2013 still includes
STSADM in the C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server
Extensions\15\bin directory, but PowerShell is the new way of scripting
SharePoint administration.
Note All examples in this book will assume use of the SharePoint graphical user interface or PowerShell.
No doubt, you have already
realized that the Central Administration site runs atop of SharePoint
itself and consists of the typical navigation elements and ribbon
that users of a SharePoint team site would expect. The Central
Administration home page provides a plethora of links to various
functional areas for configuration and administration of the farm, and
SharePoint groups these links by functional area (also listed in the
left navigation). Clicking on the heading name for any of these
functional areas takes you to another sub-page with many more links to
configure SharePoint in that functional category. The following
sections describe the functional areas, at a high level, available in
Central Administration. The majority of these functional areas will be
covered in greater depth in later chapters.
1. Application Management
The Application Management section allows you
to configure web applications, site collections, service applications,
and content databases. Figure 2 shows the Application Management operations.
A web application is a physical ASP.NET
application that resides on disk within each WFE SharePoint server and
registers within IIS to handle incoming requests on a given URL. Since
a web application is an ASP.NET application, a web app has a web.config
file that contains all application-relevant settings.
A site collection is the topmost content
collection for sites in SharePoint. Sites, lists, documents, web parts,
et al., must all belong to a site collection. SharePoint stores the
site collection in a content database, and a web application renders a
site collection on a URL. A site collection can only store in one
content database, but a content database can store multiple site
collections. A web application can render multiple site collections, if
each site collection has a unique URL. A single web application renders
a site collection, but multiple extended web applications may render
the same site collection. (In SharePoint 2007, this was how you could
achieve multiple authentication types for a given site collection.
SharePoint 2010 and now 2013 provide Claims-Based-Authentication,
avoiding the need for extended web applications.) Figure 3 shows the relationships between web applications, site collections, and content databases, at a high level.
Anything and everything related to web
applications is accessible via the Manage web applications link. I
cover alternate access mappings in the section titled “Alternate Access
Mappings,” which deals with providing access to web applications on different URLs and mapping external URLs to internal URLs.
The Site Collections subsection within
Application Management allows you to perform many operations. You may
create and delete site collections, modify the settings of site
collections (view all site collections), allow users to create their
own site collections via self-service, impose quotas, and apply policy
to site collections when dormant.
You can create new service
applications, delete them, and configure existing service applications
via the Manage service applications link. You may start and stop
services on a given WFE/app server using the Manage services on server
link.
The last subsection under Application
Management deals with content databases. Content databases store (you
guessed it): content from one or many site collections. You may create
new content databases, delete them, or control storage limits for each
content database (number of site collections, etc.) using the Manage
content databases link. This subsection also allows you to specify the
default SQL Server for content databases and configure retrieval
protocols for access to the data, via the Configure data retrieval
service link.
