Chapter 6: Touring Central Administration
In This Chapter
Touring the Central Administration Web site
Monitoring your SharePoint system’s health
Recovering from disaster and managing software patches
SharePoint 2010 significantly improved and organized the Central Administration site, gave its design a sizable facelift, and included new functionality to give you better insight into the health of your SharePoint deployment. In earlier SharePoint versions, Central Administration used to serve as more of a launching pad to feature-specific administration pages (such as Search). SharePoint 2010 fully integrates the administration panel into all standard SharePoint features and service applications. Result: streamlined administration in a single user interface. It’s not only slick, it works better.
In this chapter, we walk through the Central Administration Web site and highlight some of the new enhancements intended to smooth operations and simplify the management of your SharePoint 2010 farm.
Accessing Central Administration
In SharePoint 2010, Central Administration actually bucks tradition. Earlier Microsoft enterprise products have always included Management Consoles to handle administrative chores in such products such as Microsoft Exchange and SQL Server. SharePoint was one of the first Microsoft products to depart from that approach: It introduced a Web-based user interface in SharePoint Team Services 1.0 and followed up by integrating Web-based management into SharePoint ...