Manage Web Applications In SharePoint 2016 Central Administration

Welcome to an article on how to manage web applications in the Central Administration of SharePoint 2016. Here, we will see how the Central Admin controls and manages the web applications.

Let’s open the Central Admin of SharePoint on your machine. On your Windows desktop screen, click Start >> Administrative Tools >> SharePoint 2016 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.
You will see Web Applications.
Click on "Manage Web Applications".
You will see the screen given below.
Here, we can see various options to work with the Web Applications.
Let’s see them from left to right in different parts of the article.

We have four categories where the events have been categorized.

Contribute
Manage
Security
Policy

In part 1, we completed “New” under "Contribute". In this article, we will see the other functions available to us.

Let’ see how we can extend the web application.

Extend
IIS Web Site
You can either choose an existing IIS website or create a new one.

If you choose the default one, just select it from the drop-down above or create a new one by adding the name, port number, host header, and path to the IIS website.
Security Configuration
- Allow Anonymous- You can allow or disallow access to the anonymous users.
- User SSL- You can use SSL as per your requirement but if you use SSL you need to provide an adequate certificate, or else the website will not be accessible.
Claims Authentication Types

You can use three types of authentication.
- Windows Authentication
  - Integrate
    You can integrate Windows authentication with NTLM or Negotiate/Kerberos depending on your organization's structure. If you choose Kerberos, the application pool needs to be on the Network Service, whereas NTLM will work on any application pool.
  - Basic
    Basic authentication will use the credentials in an unencrypted manner to provide you access.
  - Form Based
    You can also use form-based authentication, which will allow the users to enter the credentials on a form and validate accordingly.
- Sign-in Page URL
  You can choose if desired to have a sign-in page as default or custom. If custom, you have to provide a URL for the same.
- Public URL
  The public URL is the domain URL, which will act as a front-end link for all SharePoint Applications, using the Web.
- Once you complete the configuration, click "OK". The Web Application will be extended.

In this part of the managing web applications lesson, we saw how to create a Web Application. There are more features under managing the Web Applications, which we will see in the next article.

Until then, keep reading and keep learning.