Professional Microsoft® SharePoint® Designer 2007

3.2. On the Server

As you have seen, SharePoint presents a consistent, unified face to its users and site owners. That all changes when you get to the server; it is here that the long and varied history, described in Appendix A, surfaces in the many different methods used to perform individual tasks. While most common administration can be performed through the Central Administration web interface, other tasks can only be performed by editing configuration files manually, or using the SharePoint command-line tool STSADM.EXE. Still other tasks require some combination of these methods.

Again, it is not the purpose of this book to explain all of the nuances of SharePoint administration; however, you need to know certain things to make appropriate customization choices. This section presents an overview of a SharePoint Server farm. Details of particular configuration tasks are provided as needed throughout the rest of the book.

3.2.1. Central Administration

SharePoint Central Administration is the primary control panel for a SharePoint Server farm. Figure 3-10 shows the Central Administration home page. If you think it looks a lot like a SharePoint site, you're right!

Figure 3-10. Figure 3-10

The Central Administration site is a custom SharePoint web application, created automatically with a random TCP port on the first server configured in your farm. It is called a farm because ...