In this article I would like to experiment with Central Administration web applications.

About Central Administration

The SharePoint Central Administration is a website used for:

In summary the Central Administration is an Administrator/Developer tool. It is used to manage the websites for other users.

Opening Central Administration

We can access central administration from the start menu item:

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On executing the command you can see the following screen in the browser (ensure you provided the credentials properly - by default it will be system username and password)

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Now we are ready to explore web applications. Before that we need to go through the hierarchy of web applications, sites etc.

Hierarchy

The following is the hierarchy of SharePoint Farms, Web Applications, Site Collections, Sites, Lists and Documents.

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The following is the description of the items in the above image:

Viewing existing Web Applications

On installation, there are 2 web applications by default:

  1. SharePoint Port 80 which is the one the user sees
  2. SharePoint Central Administration meant for Administrators

To view the web applications, click on the Manage web applications link under Applications Management category. You will see the following screen:

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Please note the URLs for each of the web applications.

References

http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/sharepoints-site-hierarchy-model.html

Summary

In this article we have seen the hierarchy of SharePoint and creation of WebSite and SiteCollection.