Using the New Central Administration WHAT’S IN THIS CHAPTER? Using the Farm Confi guration Wizard Setting up Managed Accounts Finding your way around the new and improved interface Using the Ribbon in Central Administration Backing up and restoring your site with Central Administration Now that you’ve laid down the SharePoint bits and fi nished running through the SharePoint Confi guration Wizard, you get your fi rst taste of using SharePoint 2010 when Central Administration launches. This chapter mainly serves as a general overview of Central Administration. Many topics require more than just a few pages to adequately cover; in fact, some topics actually have entire chapters dedicated to them. In this chapter we’ll hit the major highlights of Central Administration, and point you to different areas in this book that cover certain topics in more detail. A QUICK OVERVIEW OF THE NEW CENTRAL ADMINISTRATION INTERFACE If you could navigate Central Administration in SharePoint 2007 with your eyes closed, you might be in for a bit of a shock when you fi rst look at Central Administration in SharePoint 2010. One of the fi rst things you will notice about the new Central Administration is that it looks nothing like the Central Administration in SharePoint 2007 that we came to know and 6 142 CHAPTER 6 UsiNg the NeW ceNtral admiNistratioN love. In SharePoint 2010, all tasks and links are divided into one of eight categories. You can see these categories on the home page of Central Administration, both in the Quick Launch and in the body, as shown in Figure 6-1. Underneath each category header are several links, which enable you to access some of the more frequently used pages in each category, right from the home page. Clicking the headings of each category will take you to that category’s page, which features additional subcat- egories and links related to the category. Although this new layout is vastly different from SharePoint 2007’s Central Administration, it may also seem somewhat familiar to you: the new categorical approach is visually and structurally similar to the look and feel of the Control Panel in Windows Vista and Windows 7. FIGURE 61 As you click through some of the links in the various pages, you will encounter several pages that look nearly identical to their SharePoint 2007 counterparts. In many instances, how you confi gure certain settings hasn’t changed a bit, only the way they are accessed. Aside from the reorganized settings, Central Administration also makes use of another major change to the SharePoint platform: the Ribbon. The Ribbon interface (also known as the Fluent UI) was intro- duced with the Offi ce 2007 suite of clients. In the Offi ce clients, the Ribbon was used to make more tasks available to the user at one time, while logically grouping them together. In SharePoint 2010, this same idea is carried over. The Ribbon interface is designed to make accessing settings and performing tasks easier for both administrators and users. Using the Ribbon interface from a user perspective is covered in Chapter 2. First Things First 143 The Ribbon isn’t used in Central Administration as extensively as it is in the normal user interface, but understanding how it works will make your life easier. This chapter covers some of the basics of the Ribbon as it pertains to Central Administration. As you start using Central Administration, you’ll notice that its structure is much “flatter” than SharePoint 2007. By using the categorical approach to organizing the content in Central Administration, tasks and settings can usually be accessed in fewer clicks than it used to take in SharePoint 2007. Because the links are divided among eight categories, many administrators will likely discover that finding links is much quicker, as there is less guesswork as to where a link would logically be located. FIRST THINGS FIRST You just finished up the install and are greeted by Central Administration. This section gives you an overview of the steps taken the first time you access Central Administration post install. (If the install has already been done and you are just accessing the server for the first time you can skip this section and jump forward a page or two to the “Managed Accounts” section.) Central Administration fires up for the first time immediately after the SharePoint Configuration Wizard finishes its tasks. A pop-up window opens first, and you’ll be asked if you’d like to participate in the Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP) to make SharePoint better. Make your selection and click OK to close the pop-up. Central Administration offers to help you through the initial setup process right off the bat by asking if you’d like to run through the Farm Configuration Wizard (see Figure 6-2). You can choose to run through the wizard now or run it later if you wish. Generally, you’ll probably want to run through the wizard, as it enables you to provision a default set of service applications and create a web application to start exploring SharePoint 2010. It’s pretty short — only a couple of options and questions and you’ll be ready to go. Of course, you can also configure the farm manually and skip the wizard altogether if you wish. The wizard simply provides a one-stop-shop for getting up and running with SharePoint 2010. Chapter 7 covers the manual pro- cess for provisioning service applications. FIGURE 62 144 CHAPTER 6 UsiNg the NeW ceNtral admiNistratioN If you accidentally close the Central Administration window, or are accessing the server for the first time and are looking for the site, you can easily open it from the Start menu. Simply click Start All Programs Microsoft SharePoint Products SharePoint 2010 Central Administration. The Farm Configuration Wizard If you decide to walk through the Farm Configuration Wizard, select the option to Walk me through the settings using this configuration wizard … and click Next. If you chose to skip the Farm Configuration Wizard, you can always run it later from the Central Administration home page. The first screen in the Farm Configuration Wizard lets you choose or create a managed account (see the following section) that will be used as the service account. This service account will run the ser- vice applications that you select to have the wizard create. You can set up additional instances of the service applications with any account you choose later as well. Below the Service Account section, you’ll see that you can choose which service applications will be provisioned by the wizard for the farm. Note that nearly all the services are checked for you. If you know you aren’t going to be using certain services, you can deselect them. It’s easy to create new service applications later and add them to the default set, so don’t get too hung up on choosing the right set of services out of the gate. Managed Accounts Managed accounts are a brand new concept in SharePoint 2010. They are designed to give admin- istrators more control over the domain accounts that are used to run the various components of SharePoint. When an account is registered with SharePoint, administrators can maintain the account from within SharePoint, without worrying about how a change, such as a password change, will affect the SharePoint farm. When a domain account is registered with SharePoint as a managed account, it can be used to run various components of the farm, such as application pools or service applications. The account used to install SharePoint is automatically registered as a managed account. When you run the Farm Configuration Wizard for the first time, you have the option to register as many service accounts as you will need. You can also add more accounts later by clicking the Security category from the Central Administration home page and selecting Configure managed accounts under the General Security subcategory. When registering a managed account, you simply need to provide the username (with the domain) and password. Next, you can configure whether you’d like to have SharePoint automatically handle the password changes for you. If you decide to use the automatic password change option, SharePoint will take over setting the password for the account in Active Directory for as long as the account is registered as a managed account. This is extremely useful because it completely removes the burden of managing several account passwords. If your organization also enforces a password change policy, SharePoint will detect this and change the password a set number of days before the expiry of the policy. The default is two days, but you can configure the number of days beforehand that SharePoint will change the password. You can also have SharePoint notify a user or group of users via e-mail before the password is changed by checking the option to start notifying by e-mail. Below this checkbox is the scheduler for setting when and how often the password will be changed. You can have the password First Things First 145 changed automatically every week, specifying the days and times during which the change can occur; or you can have the password change monthly, choosing a day and time range during which the pass- word can be changed, or choosing a specifi c day and time, such as the fourth Tuesday at 3:00 a.m. All of the preceding options are shown in Figure 6-3. FIGURE 63 You don’t have to allow SharePoint to change the passwords automatically; you can still easily manage password changes from within Central Administration now, knowing that changing the password on a managed account will go smoothly. (In SharePoint 2007, administrators often ran into issues when changing passwords on accounts SharePoint relied on, but this is no longer a prob- lem.) From the Managed Accounts page, you can click the Edit button next to the account whose password you’d like to set. From this screen, you can change the password by checking the box next to Change password now, and either have SharePoint automatically generate a strong password, use a new password, or use an existing password. Accounts can also be removed from SharePoint as long as they are not associated with any farm ser- vices (see Chapter 7 for more on service applications). In that case, you can click the X in the Remove column of the Managed Account list. If SharePoint has been managing the password for this account, you will not know what it is, but fortunately you have the option to change the password as you disas- sociate the account from SharePoint. You can check the box to change the password on the Remove Managed Account screen, and specify a new password for the account. An additional consideration: If someone goes into AD directly and changes the password for the account without telling SharePoint, your managed accounts will not work. SharePoint needs to know the account’s password to use it. If you need to change the password it is best to use the preceding option of changing the password from SharePoint and not using an AD tool. 146 CHAPTER 6 UsiNg the NeW ceNtral admiNistratioN CENTRAL ADMINISTRATION CATEGORIES From the Central Administration home page, you’ll notice that some of the most commonly used actions are immediately available under the heading for each category. For instance, you can start creating site collections in a single click from the home page with the link Create site collections under the Application Management header. Similarly, you can quickly start a backup by clicking the Perform a backup link under the Backup and Restore header. The rest of the actions found in each category can be accessed by clicking the category’s header or its corresponding link in the Quick Launch. Another nice feature added to this new Central Administration site is the use of tooltips when hovering over a link. Throughout Central Administration, hovering the mouse over a link will give you a brief description of what that link opens. The following sections describe the various categories and what you can do with each. Application Management The Application Management category is likely the area of Central Administration you will use the most. As you might guess from its name, Application Management is the location from which you manage your web applications and service applications and related items, such as site collections and databases. This category includes a good portion of the links that were found in the Application Management tab of SharePoint 2007’s Central Administration. In SharePoint 2010, the Application Management category is further divided into several subcategories, each pertaining to a specific area. Web Applications In the Web Applications section (see Figure 6-4), you can access a list of all the web applications available in the farm, as well as configure alternate access mappings. Clicking the Manage web applications link will open a list of all of the web applications you have running in the farm. FIGURE 64 You’ll notice that initially you can’t do a whole lot with the Ribbon, as nearly every button is grayed out with the exception of the New button. Once you select a web application on the page, the Ribbon lights up and gives you many other options that can be used for changing the settings for the selected web application. You’ll also notice that many options that were available from the Application Management tab in SharePoint 2007 now live on the Ribbon, reducing link clutter on the page (see Figure 6-5). . Administration Now that you’ve laid down the SharePoint bits and fi nished running through the SharePoint Confi guration Wizard, you get your fi rst taste of using SharePoint 2010 when Central Administration. Central Administration in SharePoint 2007 with your eyes closed, you might be in for a bit of a shock when you fi rst look at Central Administration in SharePoint 2010. One of the fi rst things. nothing like the Central Administration in SharePoint 2007 that we came to know and 6 142 CHAPTER 6 UsiNg the NeW ceNtral admiNistratioN love. In SharePoint 2010, all tasks and links are divided