SharePoint 2010 - Central Administration

SharePoint 2010 - Central Administration

The SharePoint Central Administration is a website used for:

•Application Management (Web Application, Sites, Lists, Services etc.)

•Monitoring (Job Status, Problems etc.)

•Security

•Application Settings, System Settings

•Performing Backup/Restore

•Configure Search, Services, Migration Assisting etc.

•In summary the Central Administration is an Administrator/Developer tool. It is used to manage the websites for other users.

Opening Central Administration

We can access central administration from the start menu item:

On executing the command you can see the following screen in the browser (ensure you provided the credentials properly - by default it will be system username and password)

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.

Hierarchy

Server Farm: Server Farm contains multiple components like SharePoint server and database server providing multiple Web Applications spanned over multiple machines. For development machines one single machine can support all the components.
 

Web Application: Web Application contains multiple Site Collections. This could be equivalent to an ASP.NET application.

Site Collection: Site Collection contains multiple Sites.

Site: Site contains Lists, Documents etc.