Managing SharePoint 2010 Using Central Administration : Introducing Central Administration

Note:

You need to be logged on as a local or domain administrator of the server or as a user configured as a SharePoint administrator to manage your Central Administration settings.

There are two ways to access Central Administration.

• By using the default URL and port number configured during the installation.

• By using the Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Products program group, accessed through the following steps.

  1. On the Start menu, point to All Programs, select Microsoft SharePoint 2010, and then select Products.

  2. Select SharePoint 2010 Central Administration.

Note:

Best Practices Use an SSL certificate and https:// to access your Central Administration Web page. This will secure all traffic, including authentication, across your network.

The home page of SharePoint 2010 no longer has the Operations and Application Management tabs that were present in SharePoint Server 2007. Instead, the features on the SharePoint 2010 Central Administration home page, shown in Figure 1, are grouped into the following eight major functional categories, which contain different farm configuration and management components.

• Application Management

• System Settings

• Monitoring

• Backup And Restore

• Security

• Upgrade And Migration

• General Application Settings

• Configuration Wizards

Each of the category headings can be accessed from the home page of Central Administration by clicking the icon next to the category, the title of the functional category, or title of the functional category on the left side of the page.

The home page also contains the Resources Web Part, which provides you with the ability to add new links to your Central Administration home page. To add a link, click Add New Link to display the dialog box shown in Figure 2. Enter the information requested in the dialog box and click Save. After you add a link, you will be able to access the site you specified from your Central Administration home page.

The Resources Web Part is like most other lists, in that if you point to the Web Part and select the check box in the upper-right corner of the Web Part, the List and Items Ribbons will be displayed. Doing this allows you to make modifications to the list, such as adding columns, filtered views, or new items. You can also export and import to this list, which is important because it gives you the ability to build a set of links to support sites, third-party vendors, or My Sites that can be accessed directly from this Web Part.

The primary components of the Central Administration user interface (UI) haven’t changed much from SharePoint Server 2007, so if you are familiar with that version of SharePoint, you will find many of the menus to be similar. However, there are some additional options and functionality available. One of the most obvious changes you will notice is how the introduction of the Ribbon interface simplifies the way you manage some of your SharePoint components from Central Administration, such as Web applications.

Web applications are still created and managed following the same general procedures as were used in SharePoint Server 2007, but you now manage the creation and configuration of the applications using a Ribbon interface on the Manage Web Applications page, as shown in Figure 3. The Ribbon makes it easier for you to view or change details about your Web application by clicking one of the supplied options on the Ribbon. This is an improvement from SharePoint Server 2007, in which many tasks required you to click different menus and often made it necessary to reselect the Web application each time. Now, you simply select the Web application you want to manage, and all configurable options for managing that Web application are easily accessible from the Ribbon interface.