Last night I remembered that after I read the SharePoint Administrator’s Companion I put together my own administrative guide. I needed something much shorter that would take the SharePoint administrative interfaces as a starting point. This was effectively a click-by-click administrative reference. In fact, I assembled it by going through each button click available.
I didn’t have a blog at the time, but I’ll be publishing it over the next few days, starting with an overview below. It will be followed with:
- Farm Administration
- Web Application Administration
- Shared Service Provider Administration
- Site Collection Administration
- Site Administration
Overview
A typical MOSS 2007 farm will consist of at least four web applications:
- SharePoint Central Administration (always only one per-farm)
- Shared Service Provider (SSP) Administration (there can be up to twenty SSPs per-farm, although performance guidelines recommend no more than three)
- My Site (there can be many per-farm, but only one per-SSP)
- My Sites can reside within the SSP Administration web application, but for administrative purposes, such as backup/restore, this is often impractical
- Also note that each My Site is its own Site Collection, so there is excellent scalability
- SharePoint web applications (there can be many sites within many site collections within many web applications), to include some or all of the following:
- Corporate web sites
- Extranets
- Intranets
End-users will generally only concern themselves with the intranet/extranet/internet sites and their My Site. Central Administration and Shared Service Provider Administration sites provide distinct administrative functionality and scope. The next post will cover farm administration functionality in the Central Administration web application.
This guide is focused on MOSS 2007, but will identify all MOSS-specific functionality.
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