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Understanding Administrative Concepts and Tools

You can better manage Visual Studio Team Foundation Server (TFS) if you understand its architecture, the basic concepts behind its structure, and the tools for managing your deployment that are provided as part of the system. To deploy and manage TFS, you must understand both how it works and how it communicates with other components of Team Foundation. As an administrator for TFS, you must become familiar with Windows security restrictions, user account control, and SQL Server databases and security. If your deployment is integrated with SharePoint Products, you will also need to familiarize yourself with site collection and Web application management.

By choosing a deployment topology that best meets the needs of your business, you can help maintain the long-term manageability and sustainability of the software projects that you support. You can review the example topologies of TFS to see what kind of topology might best suit your needs.

TFS includes an administration console to help you with many of the administration tasks that are involved in managing and maintaining your deployment of TFS. By using the console, you can organize and manage users, collections of software projects, and build and virtual lab environments. You can also review the status of your deployment and view logs of server activity.

Common Tasks

Common Tasks

Supporting Content

Learn about Team Foundation Server concepts and architecture: You can better plan for and manage TFS if you understand its architecture, the requirements for deploying it in a domain or a workgroup, and the basic concepts and terminology used throughout this documentation.

Team Foundation Server Concepts

Team Foundation Server Architecture

The Team Foundation Administration Console

Naming Restrictions in Team Foundation

Using Team Foundation Server Command-Line Tools

Organizing Your Server with Team Project Collections

Interactions Between SharePoint Products and Team Foundation Server

Understanding SQL Server and SQL Server Reporting Services

Choose a deployment topology: You can install and configure Team Foundation Server in many ways. You can also expand or reduce your deployment as your needs change. Review the example topologies to help you decide what configuration might best suit your development needs.

Examples of Simple Topology

Examples of Moderate Topology

Examples of Complex Topology

Examples of Hosted Topology

Get Up and Running With a Single-Server Installation [Tutorial]

Maintain the health of your deployment: You can back up the databases that contain the data for your deployment of Team Foundation Server.

Backing up and Restoring Your Deployment

See Also

Concepts

Configuring Your Server Using the Team Foundation Administration Console

Organizing Your Server with Team Project Collections

Configuring Users, Groups, and Permissions

Other Resources

Configuring Resources to Support Team Projects

Managing Permissions