Manage farm administration settings (Windows SharePoint Services)

Applies To: Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

Topic Last Modified: 2008-02-05

To manage farm administration settings, you can perform the following procedures:

• Configure the default settings for a server farm

  After the initial installation and configuration of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, you can configure several additional settings. Although the configuration of additional settings is optional, many key features, such as e-mail notifications and antivirus settings, are not available until these settings are configured.

  For more information, see Configure the default settings for a server farm (Windows SharePoint Services).

• Change the Central Administration Web site port number

  By default, the SharePoint Central Administration Web site application is set up on a random TCP port during installation. Depending on your server environment, the security policies for your organization may be more restrictive, and may require you to change the IIS binding in order to comply with those policies.

  To perform this procedure, see Change the Central Administration Web site port number (Windows SharePoint Services).

• Manage the Administrative Tasks list

  By default, the items in the Administrator Tasks list are created automatically during installation, and contain tasks that are to be performed by farm administrators immediately following installation. You can manage the Administrator Tasks list to assign tasks to other administrators, to report the status on specific tasks, and to hide completed tasks from the list in Central Administration. You can further customize the Administrator Tasks list by adding new tasks to the list.

  To perform this procedure, see Manage the Administrative Tasks List (Windows SharePoint Services).

• Manage alternate access mappings

  Each Web application can be associated with a collection of mappings between internal and public URLs. Both internal and public URLs consist of the protocol and domain portion of the full URL (for example, https://www.fabrikam.com). Users type a public URL in order to get to the SharePoint site, and that URL is what appears in the links on the pages. Internal URLs are in the URL requests that are sent to the SharePoint site. Many internal URLs can be associated with a single public URL in multi-server farms (for example, when a load balancer routes requests to specific IP addresses to various servers in the load-balancing cluster).

  Each Web application supports five collections of mappings per URL; the five collections correspond to five zones (Default, Intranet, Extranet, Internet, and Custom). When the Web application receives a request for an internal URL in a particular zone, links on the pages returned to the user have the public URL for that zone.

  To perform this procedure, see Manage alternate access mappings (Windows SharePoint Services Central Administration Help).

  For more information about alternate access mapping, see What every SharePoint administrator needs to know about Alternate Access Mappings (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=87574&clcid=0x409). For information about implementing alternate access mappings for common Internet deployment scenarios, see Plan alternate access mappings (Windows SharePoint Services).

• Run the Best Practices Analyzer tool

  The Best Practices Analyzer tool provides a detailed report of recommended changes that administrators can make to their SharePoint Products and Technologies installation in order to achieve greater performance. The tool can be run locally, or from a server that is not attached to the server farm. After running the tool, you can review the report that contains a list of errors and warnings, and recommendations for how to fix the issues detected by the tool.

  To perform this procedure, see Run the Best Practices Analyzer Tool for Windows SharePoint Services.