Microsoft SharePoint 2013 -

Central AdministrationVerified Against Build #15.0.4128.1014

Prepared by

Sriram BalaSharePoint Practice

Central Administration 2

Table of ContentsSharePoint 2013 Central Administration...............................................................................3Features of Central Administration.......................................................................................3

Application Management...................................................................................................5System Settings.................................................................................................................7Monitoring......................................................................................................................... 8Backup and Restore...........................................................................................................9Security........................................................................................................................... 10Upgrade and Migration....................................................................................................11General Application Settings...........................................................................................12APPS................................................................................................................................ 13

Central Administration 3

SharePoint 2013 Central Administration

This is a site used by admins to manage and configure settings for SharePoint web applications or the whole farm. Central Administration web site is the graphical user interface to management of a SharePoint 2013 farm.

Features of Central Administration

Central Administration 4

Central Administration 5

The main areas of SPCA:-

Application Management Here, you can manage existing web applications, as well as cre-

ate new web applications, site collections, and content databases.

Monitoring From this area, you have access to a set of tools for monitoring the farm,

checking for issues, and solving problems.

Security Here, you can manage administrative accounts and services’ accounts of the farm,

and configure all the security-related features.

General Application Settings This is the area where you manage general settings, such

as site directory and search engine settings, content deployment features, form services, and more.

System Settings From this area, you can manage servers in the farm, the farm topology,

services on servers, and farm customization features.

Backup and Restore This area provides access to all the tools for managing and handling

disaster recovery tasks.

Upgrade and Migration Here, you can manage upgrade and patching tasks.

Apps This area provides access to the app configuration and management tools. You can

configure and monitor installed apps and apps licenses, as well as your corporate Catalog of apps.

Configuration Wizards This area provides a wizard to configure the farm from scratch.

Central Administration 6

Application Management

Figure shows the Application Management section in Central Administration.

The Application Management section allows you to configure web applications, site collections, service applications, and content databases. In the section titled “Creating Your First Web Application,” you will discover how to create a new web application, and in the section titled “Creating a Site Collection,” you will create a new site collection.

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.

Central Administration 7

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 shows the relationships between web applications, site collections, and content databases, at a high level.

System Settings

Central Administration 8

Figure shows the System Settings section in Central Administration.

The System Settings section contains settings for management of servers in the farm and services on a server, configuring outgoing and incoming e-mail, and managing farm settings for installed custom and third-party solution packages. Notice this Farm Management subsection also contains a link to configuring alternate access mappings, which is the same link as in the Application Management section. Figure shows the System Settings in Central Administration.

A farm solution consists of a WSP (SharePoint Solution Package) and might deploy DLLs to the GAC or web application BIN folder, or install files in the hive (c:\program files\common files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\15). User solutions, on the other hand, may only install content to a site collection and not deploy any asset that may affect other site collections or web applications running in the farm. App model manifests can also deploy WSP files.

Features provide discrete functionality, such as a feature to install a list in a site collection, or a feature to add web.config settings to a web application. Features may have one of four scope levels: farm, web application, site, and web. The scope depends on the functionality that the feature provides. In the System Settings section of Central Administration you may activate and deactivate features at the farm scope.

Monitoring

Central Administration 9

Figure shows the Monitoring section in Central Administration.

The Monitoring section is very important for diagnosing problems in your farm. The Reporting subsection contains links to settings to configure administrative reports, diagnostic logging, health reports, and usage reports. Developers and administrators who install custom components that have failed are likely familiar with the diagnostic logging section, which allows you to throttle the severity of information, warning, and error messages reported in the ULS (Unified Logging System) log.

Timer jobs are an important part of SharePoint infrastructure. A centralized timer service (OWS Timer) runs on each SharePoint server and coordinates communication between different SharePoint servers, and also executes tasks at scheduled times. SharePoint maintains a number of scheduled tasks—jobs—to maintain the health of the farm and to background-task lengthy processes, which would otherwise delay users in real time. You may review scheduled timer jobs and change settings for jobs in the Timer Jobs subsection of Monitoring.

Backup and Restore

Central Administration 10

Figure shows the Backup and Restore section in Central Administration.

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.

SharePoint backup comes in two flavours: 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;

Security

Central Administration 11

Figure 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.

Central Administration 12

Upgrade and Migration

Figure shows the Upgrade and Migration section in Central Administration.

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.

Central Administration 13

General Application Settings

Figure shows the section for General Application Settings in Central Administration

The General Application Settings section provides configuration of InfoPath services, SharePoint Designer, Content Deployment, External Service Connections, and Search. Links to search administration and crawler impact rules are identical to those when managing the settings for a SharePoint Search Service Application in Application Management.

Microsoft introduced InfoPath services in SharePoint Server 2007 as an enterprise feature and allows SharePoint to host custom-developed InfoPath forms. InfoPath forms are Microsoft’s answer to hosting dynamic forms, which business users otherwise would accomplish with third-party or custom-developed ASP.NET forms, PDF forms, or Word forms.

Since SharePoint 2010, InfoPath fully integrates into the platform, rather than being an add-on service like that of SharePoint 2007. Using SharePoint Designer, developers can convert regular list edit forms into InfoPath forms for custom data input and form design for user’s. This subsection of the General Application Settings section allows you to upload form templates, for use across the farm, manage data connections—in the case where forms call out to SharePoint or external data sources to show data in forms—and configure InfoPath services to use web services.

APPS

Central Administration 14

Figure shows the Apps section in Central Administration.

The Apps section in Central Administration is new to SharePoint 2013. Microsoft has introduced the concept of the Apps, App Store, and Marketplace to Office and SharePoint. The idea is that developers will now develop small applications that integrate with any Office application and SharePoint, and authenticate users through a common OAUTH protocol.

This section in Central Administration provides configuration with a Microsoft App Store, integrated apps in the farm, and permission of apps. Monitoring of apps and configuration of app licenses is also possible from this section.