Operations Management with the SharePoint Central Administration Tool

The single most important tool to a SharePoint administrator is the SharePoint Central Administration tool (SPCA), shown in Figure 6.1. This tool, run on a dedicated IIS virtual server using a unique port (such as 14199), is installed on the first server in a farm. The tool can be invoked from the server console from the Start menu or, because it is web-based and is effectively just a SharePoint site collection within a dedicated web application, it can be invoked from any workstation. It is actually preferable from a security perspective to access the SharePoint Central Administration tool from a different workstation. If doing so, be sure to note what the hostname and port is for the SharePoint central web application when created.

Figure 6.1. Using the SharePoint Central Administration tool.

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Note

Although the default is to choose a custom port for the SharePoint Central Administration tool, it is recommended to instead change this to the default HTTPS port of 443, so that an SSL certificate can be easily added and a unique name for the SPCA tool can be used. For example, https://spca.companyabc.com would be an example of a best-practice way of accessing the SharePoint Central Administration tool from another workstation. This has the added advantage of enabling SPCA to be easily load balanced using network load balancing, either hardware-based or software-based, between two servers running the SPCA service.

The SPCA tool is divided into a home page, shown in Figure 6.1, which provides a launching point for some of the most commonly used tasks in SPCA. More detailed sets of tasks can be launched by clicking the links listed in the left pane of the page. These links take you to specific pages for each category of administration, including the following:

• Application Management

• System Settings

• Monitoring

• Backup and Restore

• Security

• Upgrade and Migration

• General Application Settings

• Configuration Wizards

Each of these categories and the tasks that can be performed within them are listed in subsequent sections of this chapter.

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