Comparing General Application Settings in SharePoint Foundation 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise

Although the home page of the Central Administration site shows similar features and tools available between SharePoint Foundation 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise, there are some revealing differences in the General Application Settings page, as shown in Table 18.4. The only tools provided in SharePoint Foundation 2010 are the External Service Connections tools and the SharePoint Designer settings tool.

Table 18.4. Comparing General Application Settings in SharePoint Foundation 2010 to SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise

SharePoint Server 2010 Standard and Enterprise provide numerous other tools such as InfoPath Forms Services (Enterprise edition only), Site Directory, Search, and Content Deployment tools. InfoPath Forms Services allows farm administrators to make InfoPath forms available via the web browser to SharePoint users, and these users do not need to have InfoPath available on their desktops. The Site Directory tool allows the farm administrator to define a site directory, which is a site that captures new site collections, which is helpful in larger organizations where there may be hundreds or thousands of sites created, and grouping them in logical subgroups can make navigation much easier for end users.

As mentioned in the “Search in SharePoint Foundation 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010” section, earlier in this chapter, both SharePoint Foundation 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010 provide basic search tools, but SharePoint Server 2010 provides a number of additional management tools that may be of interest during the architecture and design process. The General Application Settings page provides access to a selection of farm-level search settings, such as proxy server, timeout, and the option to ignore Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) warnings. In addition, crawler impact rules can be set here, which allow the farm administrator to fine-tune how many documents are requested at a time from sites being crawled by SharePoint Server 2010.

Finally, content deployment is also only included in SharePoint Server 2010 Standard or Enterprise, and is used to deploy content from one site collection to another site collection. This is typically used by organizations who create content in one tier (for example, a staging tier), and then publish it regularly to a production tier, which could house the production intranet portal, or to an external Internet-facing farm that houses an Internet website. Content deployment requires the creation of paths and jobs, which can be full or incremental.