Welcome to an article on Central Administration of SharePoint 2016. Here, we will see how the Central Admin controls SharePoint sites from the back-end.
How do we access the Admin portal?
When you install and configure SharePoint on your machine or Server, it creates a Central Administration site. This site is a place where you control all the options and features of SharePoint sites.
Central Admin helps us control the user activities. It controls even the activities of the site owners, which help us in protecting the environment and keeping it secure. This helps us to activate or deactivate the configurations and features through all the Web Applications, site collections, and sites; thereby, saving time and efforts.
a. Let’s open Central Admin of the SharePoint in your machine. Click "Start" in your Windows, select Administrative Tools, and then click SharePoint 2016 Central Administration.
b. Run it as an administrator to have elevated privileges.
You will see the screen below.
c. Central Admin is configured under the categories given below.
1. Application Management This section is divided into "Web Applications", "Site Collections", "Service Applications", and "Databases" configuration.
2. System Settings This section is divided into the Servers, "E-Mail and Text Messages", and "Farm Management" configuration.
3. Monitoring This section is divided into Health Analyser, Timer Jobs, and Reporting configuration.
4. Backup and Restore This section is divided into "Farm Backup and Restore" and "Granular Backup" configuration.
5. Security This section is divided into "Users", "General Security", and "Information Policy" configuration.
6. Upgrade & Migration This section assists you in "Upgrade and Patch Management".
7. General Application Settings This section is divided into "External Service Connections", "Infopath Forms Services", "SharePoint designer", "Search", "Content Deployment", and PWA Setting configuration.
8. Apps This section is divided into "SharePoint" and "Office Store" configurations.
9. Office 365
This section assists Office 365 configuration.
10. Configuration Wizards This section assists in "Farm Configuration".
Central Administration helps to perform the administration activities for SharePoint from a single location giving an upper hand to the SharePoint administrators who do not want to perform the same configuration on multiple sites. Once the configuration is done on the Central Admin, all the sites inherit those features and configuration.
From the screens mentioned above, we can see that SharePoint 2016 Central Administration covers all the categories for administration. We will see them in details in my upcoming articles.
Until then, keep reading & keep learning.