SPFoxhole Blog

Microsoft did a major overhaul on the SharePoint Central Administration site.  If you were working with MOSS 2007 you had 3 different pages to sort through.  Now we have it condensed onto a single page layout which really makes it a lot easier to find what your looking for as everything is laid out in a proper manner.

Lets take a look at the main page:

As you can see in the above screenshot we have a one shot view of our Central Admin.   Notice how everything is bucketed properly now to make things easy to find.  In the next shots I will  expand on each section. 

Application Management

So most of you will be familiar with this area.  This was a separate page in the previous or is it current version :)  

Want another way to get back to the main page? 

Notice the Nav button im pointing at… what's cool here is that no matter how deep you go into this…. for instance i go into Web Applications / Manage Web Applications… that navigation will build making it easier to get back to the section I want.

System Settings

Again this is where you will manage your servers, services, features etc.  on the Farm

Monitoring

Monitoring was also a area that took a major overhaul.  In a follow-up post I will detail some of these areas but i can tell you this is a HUGE improvement.

Backup and Restore

I confess I have not had alot of time to test this area but I can tell you the one thing that is missing if you want to use this interface and arent interested in proper tools such as Microsoft DPM or AvePoint’s DocAve is the scheduling ability.  Still not there :(

Security

Again all the things you would expect to see and not enough room in this already long post to discuss this in detail.  More to come  :)

Upgrade and Migration

So… this screen which im not even posting is not that interesting except for one key little blurb “Manage Patch Status”  It is what you think it is…. it is a dump of your farms patch status which does deserve a small screenshot (well done guys on this one)

General Application Settings

Again more to come on this area as it needs further exploring.

Farm Configuration Wizard

Just what it sounds like… you can set up the Farm services yourself or let the Wizard configure it all for you (nice but if you do this I may lose respect for you as an Admin :))   It is great for testing though.

Well that was a brief tour through the new Central Admin.  THis was a very light look and many of these areas need a much deeper investigation which will be happening in future posts by myself and others.

Enjoy.. I am :)