Introducing Central Administration Of SharePoint 2013

Welcome to an article on Central Administration of SharePoint 2013. 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 where you control all the options and features of SharePoint sites.

Central Admin helps us to 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.

Let’s open Central Admin of the SharePoint in your machine. Click Start of your Windows, select Administrative Tools and then click SharePoint 2013 Central Administration.
Run it as an administrator to have elevated privileges.
You will see the screen below.
Central Admin is configured under the categories given below.

Application Management

This section is divided into "Web Applications", "Site Collections", "Service Applications" and "Databases" configuration.
System Settings

This section is divided into the Servers, "E-Mail and Text Messages", and "Farm Management" configuration.
Monitoring

This section is divided into Health Analyzer, Timer Jobs and Reporting configuration.
Backup and Restore

This section is divided into "Farm Backup and Restore" and "Granular Backup" configuration.
Security

This section is divided into "Users", "General Security" and "Information Policy" configuration.
Upgrade & Migration

This section assists you in "Upgrade and Patch Management".
General Application Settings

This section is divided into "External Service Connections", "Infopath Forms Services", "SharePoint designer", "Search", and "Content Deployment" configuration.
Apps

This section is divided into "SharePoint" and "Office Store" configurations.
Office 365

This section assists Office 365 configuration.
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 SharePoint Admins, who do not need to do the following configuration on the 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 2013 Central Administration covers all the categories for administration. We will see them in details in my next articles.

Until then, keep reading & keep learning.