Administering Application Management Tasks in SPCA

The Application Management page, shown in Figure 6.2, 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.

Figure 6.2. Exploring SPCA options on the Application Management page.

Web Applications

The first category on the page deals specifically with web applications and includes the following links:

• Manage Web Applications— Simply lists the web applications in the farm and their URLs and port. This area also enables the configuration of various web application settings.

• Configure Alternate Access Mappings— This highly important area controls Alternate Access Mappings (AAM), shown in Figure 6.3. AAMs are needed to indicate different server host header values for the machine. For example, in the diagram, http://intranet is the URL used to access the server internally, whereas https://sharepoint.companyabc.com is the URL used for external access. If an AAM is configured, SharePoint automatically translates all links to the host header value used by the client to access site content. This reduces the chance of links not working externally. For more information on configuring AAMs for remote access, reference Chapter 14, “Protecting SharePoint with Advanced Antivirus and Edge Security Solutions.”

Figure 6.3. Using Alternate Access Mappings.

Site Collections

Within the second category on the Application Management page, labeled Site Collections, all the options for creating, deleting, and managing individual site collections are listed. Site collections provide the highest-level administrative object entity within SharePoint, with the exception of web applications and the farm. The links provided within the Site Collections category include the following:

• Create site collections— This link allows for the creation of new site collections from within SPCA, as shown in Figure 6.4. Site collections can be created from a default list of templates, or via custom templates created by the organization and added into SPCA using PowerShell or the STSADM command-line tool.

Figure 6.4. Creating new site collections.

• Delete a site collection— Enables an administrator to delete specific site collections. Note that when deleted, it is not easy to recover an entire site collection.

• Confirm site use and deletion— Leads to a page that enables the configuration of automatic site collection deletion of unused sites. This functionality is meant to help to control the growth of SharePoint content by removing site collections no longer in use and enables administrators to define warnings that are sent to site collection administrators.

• Specify quota templates— Enables administrators to create and modify quota templates for site collections. Individual size limits can be defined for site collections and applied to the individual site collections as they are created or at a later time. Site collection administrators are notified if their sites grow above a warning limit or if they are above the maximum size limit, which will result in new content not being added to the site.

• Configure quotas and locks— Takes the administrator to settings shown in Figure 6.5 that define whether a site collection is locked; effectively not allowing any content to be added because of the result of exceeding a template or simply because the content was locked into read-only mode for one reason or another.

Figure 6.5. Viewing site quotas and locks.

• Change site collection administrators— Clicking this link in SPCA enables the administrator to define who the primary and secondary site collection administrators are for a site collection.

• View all site collections— All site collections within a specific content database can be viewed from within this link.

• Configure self-service site creation— Enables administrators to turn Self-Service Site Creation on or off for a web application. This concept enables users with the Use Self-Service Site Creation permission to create sites in defined URL namespaces. Be cautious when enabling this, because it can lead to a proliferation of sites within a site collection very quickly.

Service Applications

Within the third category on the Application Management page, labeled Service Applications, the tasks related to the critical service applications in SharePoint 2010 can be modified. For more detailed information about individual service applications, reference the chapters in which they are discussed. For example, for the Managed Metadata Service, refer to Chapter 22, “Managing Metadata and Content Types in SharePoint 2010,” and for many other service apps, refer to Chapter 26, “Extending SharePoint 2010 with Excel Services, Access Services, and Visio Graphics Services.”

• Manage service applications— This link takes administrators to the Service Applications page, shown in Figure 6.6. This page is the main administrative point to all the service applications, such as the Managed Metadata Service, PerformancePoint, Excel Services, and others.

Figure 6.6. Viewing service applications within SPCA.

• Configure service application associations— Configuring service application associations enables them to be “tied” to an individual web application so that they can be used by the site collections within those web applications. Administrators can modify which web applications these service applications are tied to from within this interface.

• Manage services on server— This link takes administrators to the page shown in Figure 6.7, which enables individual services to be started or stopped on servers. Configuration information for those specific services can be accessed by clicking the blue links for services that enable settings to be modified.

Figure 6.7. Modifying services on servers.

Databases

Within the fourth category on the Application Management page, labeled Databases, all the tasks associated with SharePoint content databases are made accessible. This includes the following links:

• Manage content databases— This link presents a list of all content databases, similar to what is shown in Figure 6.8. As a side note, by modifying the maximum number of sites that can be created within a content database, you can control which content database a site collection is installed in. This can also be controlled from within PowerShell when creating a site collection.

Figure 6.8. Administering content databases.

• Specify the default database server— The default database server used for all new databases can be specified in this section of SPCA. In addition, if using SQL Server authentication (not recommended) to connect to the SQL Server, the SA account and password can be designated here.

• Configure the data retrieval service— Data retrieval services such as OLEDB, SOAP Passthrough, CML-URL, or SharePoint Foundation can be enabled or disabled on individual web applications in this area of SPCA.