What is Central Administration 2013?

In this article we can get introduced to the Central Administration tool of SharePoint 2013.

What is Central Administration?

Central Administration is an ASP.NET web application that helps in controlling & managing SharePoint web sites. We can do Performance & Monitoring activities using Central Administration.

Central administration can be viewed through Start > SharePoint Central Administration item.

Following are the core activities that can be performed through Central Administration.

1. Create Site Collection
2. Set Quota for Site Collection
3. Manage Service Applications
4. Monitor Installation
5. Check Timer Job status
6. Configure Service Accounts
7. Manage Farm Administrators
8. Backup & Restore
9. Upgrading
10. Manage Apps & Licenses
11. SSL & Managed Paths Configuration

Central Administration is the core tool of SharePoint Administrators. In corporate installations there will dedicate person or team to manage Central Administration.

Central Administration Exploration

Let us explore some of the core areas in Central Administration.

The operations are categorized into Application Management, System Settings etc. & shown in the left pane as well as in the right pane.

Please note that there is a separate section for Apps management.

Application Management

For managing web applications use the Manage web applications link. Each site collection resides in an ASP.NET web application.

For creating site collections create use the Create site collections link.

For managing service applications use the Manage service applications link. Service Applications are background applications that provide services like user profile synchronization,

For managing content databases use the Manage content databases link.

Monitoring

For monitoring problems, checking job status the section Monitoring has to be used.

In the life time of a SharePoint installation, there could be problems like Storage Issue, Background Job issue, security issue etc. Use the Review problems and solutions link.

For checking Timer job status, use the link Check job status. (Timer Jobs are background jobs that is executed by the process named OWSTIMER.EXE. We can set interval for execution of the jobs, plus write custom timer jobs too)

Backup & Restore

We can perform backup of site collection, as well as Restore it using Central Administration.

For creating backup, use the link Perform a backup.

For restoring from a backup, use the link Restore from a backup.

Summary

In this article we had an overview of Central Administration.