Understanding Application Management
The Application Management section as the name suggests allows you to perform various functions related to managing your SharePoint Application, such as creating and managing web applications, site collection, service applications, content databases, and managing services on the SharePoint server. Figure 16.2 shows the Application Management screen.
Figure 16.2. Application Management
Application Management itself is grouped into four parts, described in the following sections.
Exploring Web Applications
The Web Applications section allows performing various administrative tasks to manage SharePoint web applications. Manage Web Applications takes you to the screen shown in Figure 16.3.
Figure 16.3. Manage Web Applications
The Web Applications Management screen allows you to create or delete web applications. Selecting a web application enables additional commands on the ribbon some of which are described here:
• Extend—This command allows you to extend an existing web application. Extending a web application means creating a new web application in a different zone that uses the same content database.
You may find yourself creating multiple web applications in different zones on multiple occasions. For example, when you have an Internet facing SharePoint site you will create a web application for the Internet zone for end users and a web application in the intranet/default zone for administration purposes. Also the search crawl ideally happens in the default/intranet zone for performance reasons.
• General Settings—The General Settings command allows you to manage various settings for web applications, such as the default time zone for the web application, quota information, alerts information, Recycle Bin settings, Resource Throttling settings, general workflow configuration, email configuration, and SharePoint Designer settings.
Resource Throttling settings drive an important configuration that can be critical to the performance of the SharePoint server. This configuration includes the max limit of records that can be retrieved from a list in one query, count of unique permissions on a list (which is also a factor in list performance), and log storage settings.
Quota templates allow you to specify storage limits for users. In addition, in SharePoint 2010 with the introduction of sandboxed solutions, quota templates also enable you to specify the sandboxed solutions resource quota limits.
• Manage Features—This command allows you to activate/deactivate web application level features for the selected web application.
• Managed Paths—This command allows you to configure managed paths. Managed paths are paths that extend the URL of the web application for creating site collections. An example of the managed path is “/sites”.
• Service Connections—This allows you to configure service applications associations for the selected web applications.
• Authentication Providers—This command allows you to configure the authentication providers for the web application for each extended zone.
• Self-Service Site Creation—Self-service site creation allows end users with the Use Self–Service Site Creation permission to create site collections. This command enables you to toggle the Self-Service Site Creation feature on and off.
In addition to the Manage Web Applications function the Configure Alternate Access Mappings function is under the Web Applications group. This option allows you to map alternate URLs to your web application.
Exploring Site Collections
This section allows you to create and manage site collections. The various configuration options are as follows:
• Create Site Collection—This screen allows you to create a new site collection within the specified web application. Figure 16.4 shows the Create Site Collection screen.
Figure 16.4. Create Site Collection
• Site Usage Confirmation and Deletion—This is a web application level configuration and allows you to set email notification settings for unused site collections. You can also specify the unused site collections to be deleted automatically after a specific time span.
The options within this screen will be disabled if you have not configured the email settings for the web application. These settings can be configured under the General Settings command of the Web Application Management screen.
• Specify Quota Templates—Quota templates specify the storage limits for a SharePoint web application. This screen allows you to create/modify quota templates.
• Site Collection Quota and Locks—This option allows you to select a quota template for all the site collections within the specified web applications. You also configure Sandbox Solution Resource Quota restrictions in this screen.
• Change Site Collection Administrators—This screen allows you to manage the site collection administrators for various site collections centrally.
Exploring Service Applications
This section allows you to create and manage service applications in your SharePoint farm. You can also manage service applications association with your web applications here. In addition you can toggle the state of various services on your server from the Manage Services on Server screen. Hour 20, “Understanding Service Applications,” looks at this section in detail.
Exploring Databases
This section allows you to manage content databases. The various configuration options are as follows:
• Manage Content Databases—This screen allows you to view and manage the content databases for the specified web applications. Figure 16.5 shows the Manage Content Databases screen.
Figure 16.5. Manage Content Databases
Clicking on the database name shows more details of that content database. The Add a Content Database command creates a new content database for the specified web application.
• Specify the Default Database Server—This option allows you to specify the default database server to create the new content databases in.