Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Central Administration Tools

There are various tools provided by Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Central Administration which helps us to manage the sites and its documents. The tools provided by Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Central Administration are as:

1)    Application Management

2)    System Settings

3)    Monitoring

4)    Backup and Restore

5)    Security

6)    Upgrade and Migration

7)    General Application Settings

We can see the tools or components in the home page of Central Administration as show in the below figure:

The details of each component of Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Central Administration are as follows:

Application Management

The Application Management page 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.

System Settings

The System Settings page contains those tasks related to the settings of the system, e-mail and text messages, and farm management. We can manage the servers, configure outgoing email settings, configure mobile account, configure privacy options, manage farm features and manage farm solutions etc.

Monitoring

The monitoring features in SharePoint Server 2010 use specific timer jobs to perform monitoring tasks and collect monitoring data. The health and usage data might consist of performance counter data, event log data, timer service data, metrics for site collections and sites, search usage data, or various performance aspects of the Web servers. The system uses this data to create health reports, Web Analysis reports, and administrative reports. The system writes usage and health data to the logging folder and to the logging database.

Backup and Restore

This describes the backup architecture and recovery processes that are available in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, including farm and granular backup and recovery, and recovery from an unattached content database. Backup and recovery operations can be performed through the user interface or through Windows PowerShell cmdlets. Built-in backup and recovery tools may not meet all the needs of your organization.

Security

SharePoint Server 2010 incorporates a new, more powerful and flexible authentication model that works with any corporate identity system, including Active Directory, directory services, LDAP-based directories, application-specific databases, and new user-centric identity models such as LiveID.

Upgrade and Migration

Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 has been designed for scale and performance and as such requires new hardware and software requirements. These requirements apply to both the in-place and the databases attach upgrade approaches. SharePoint Foundation 2010 provides new members and types that make it possible for you to upgrade custom Features through versioning and declarative upgrade actions. You can update any Features you created for Office SharePoint Server 2007 to work with SharePoint Server 2010 by using these members.

General Application Settings

We configure the Web application general settings when we create a new Web application. You can access the general settings in Central Administration by clicking Manage Web applications in the Application Management section, clicking the Web application that you want to configure, and then clicking General Settings on the ribbon.