Part 5 - Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2013 Preview Series – Application Management

ARTICLES IN THIS SERIES
Part 1 - Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2013 Preview - A First Look
Part 2 - Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2013 Preview Series – Central Administration
Part 3 - Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2013 Preview Series – Initial Farm Configuration, Default Web Application and Site Collection
Part 4 - Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2013 Preview Series – System Setup
Part 5 - Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2013 Preview Series – Application Management

OVERIEW
In Part 4 of the Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2013 Preview series, we talked about the System Setup options. In this article, we will discuss Application Management section of the Central Administration web site. 

At first glance, the application management page looks similar to SharePoint 2010. Like it’s 2010 predecessor, this page has five sections namely Web Applications, Site Collections, Service Applications, and Databases.

WEB APPLICATIONS
The available options in this section is identical to SharePoint 2010 and includes the following:

Manage Web Applications
This option will take you to the web applications management page shown below. This page has two tabs: Browse and Web Applications. Selecting “Browse” will show you the title and description of the page and will hide the ribbon. Selecting “Web Applications” will show you the ribbon on the page with the available actions.
 
The ribbon has four groups namely Contribute, Manage, Security, and Policy.

• Contribute: Options available in the contribute group include New, Extend, and Delete.
  • Selecting “New” will show you the “Create New Web Application” screen.
  • Selecting “Extend” will show you the “Extend Web Application to Another IIS Web Site” which basically allows you to configure a SharePoint site on an existing IIS site.
  • SharePoint 2013 authentication doesn’t support “Classic Mode Authentication” which was supported in SharePoint 2010 so this option is removed from the interface. The option “Trusted Identity Provider” in both Create and Extend screens is displayed by default under the authentication settings. Trusted Identity provider use SAML for authentication. You can read more about it at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff955607.aspx.
  • Selecting “Delete” in the contribute group will allow you to delete web application or remove SharePoint from IIS web site.
    
     
    
• Manage: Options available in the manage group include General Settings, Manage Features, Managed Paths, Service Connections.
  
  • Selecting “General Settings” will show allow you manage the following settings for the selected web application:
    • General Settings: This option allows you to manage general settings of a web application. New options that are added to this screen include User Settings Provider, and usage cookie. The User Settings Provider is something new to SharePoint 2013 and more information about it will be added later. The usage cookie option is added to track usage of anonymous users which was not available previously. You will also notice that the maximum upload size is increased to 250MB as compared to 50MB in SharePoint 2010.
      
    • Resource Throttling: This option allows you to configure various resource throttling options available for a web application including List View Threshold, Object Model Override, List View Threshold and Administrators, List View Lookup Threshold, Daily Time Window for Large Queries, List Unique Permissions Threshold, Backward Compatible Event Handlers, HTTP Request Monitoring and Throttling, and Change Log. These options remains the same when compared to SharePoint 2010.
      
    • Workflow Settings: This option allows you to manage workflow settings in a web application. You can configure User Defined Workflow and Workflow Task Notifications options on this page. This screen stays the same when compared to SharePoint 2010.
      
    • Outgoing E-Mail: The option allows you to change web-application-specific outgoing e-mail information.This screen stays the same when compared to SharePoint 2010.
      
    • Mobile Account: This option allows you to configure SMS service settings for your web application. This screen stays the same when compared to SharePoint 2010.
      
    • SharePoint Designer: This option allows you to configure settings for your web application interaction with SharePoint Designer. This screen stays the same when compared to SharePoint 2010.
      
  • Manage Features: You can use this option to manage features on web application level. This screen stays the same when compared to SharePoint 2010.
    
  • Managed Paths: You can use this option to configure managed or virtual paths for the selected web application site collections. This screen stays the same when compared to SharePoint 2010.
    
  • Service Connections: This option can be used to manage service application associations for the selected web application. This screen stays the same when compared to SharePoint 2010.
    
• Security: Options available in the security group include Authentication Providers, Self Service Site Creation, Blocked File Types, User Permissions, and Web Part Security.
  • Authentication Providers: This option allows you to manage authentication providers for your web applications. Do note that SharePoint 2013 only supports claims authentication. Classic authentication is no longer supported in SharePoint 2013. You can still configure your web application for NTLM or Kerberos as needed.
    
  • Self-Service Site Creation: You can use this option to manage self-service site creation which allows users to create site collections in a defined URL without requiring administrative privileges. There are changes to this screen in SharePoint 2013.
    
    • You will notice a special URL for self service site creation on the interface. You can also apply quote template. To test this feature, I have created a managed path titled “sc” and specified [%userid%] in the value. The self service site creation is done through /_layouts/15/scsignup link which in my case is http://sharepoint/_layouts/15/scsignup.aspx.
      
    • You can now select how the self-site creation link will be displayed in a site collection.
      
    • You can also specify how you want users to classify their site when configuring their site.
      
  • Blocked File Types: This option can be used to manage blocked file types.
    
  • User Permissions: You can use this option to configure user permission on the web application level. An updated option on this screen is “Override List Behaviors”. SharePoint 2010 equivalent of this option is “Override Check out”. There is no other noticeable change on this page when compared to SharePoint 2010.
    
  • Web Part Security: You can use this option to configure security for web part pages. This screen stays the same when compared to SharePoint 2010.
    
• Policy: Options available in this group includes “User Policy”, “Anonymous Policy”, “Permission Policy”.
  • User Policy: This option can be used to configure user access permissions on web application level. You can use this page to give someone a full permission on the web application level. You will see a warning displayed in this screen which was not available in SharePoint 2010. Basically, whenever you make changes to web application policy, it will trigger SharePoint search crawl and can reduce search crawl freshness and increase crawl load. It is recommended to add a security group instead of a user to the policy if needed as users can be added or removed from security group without causing any impact on search.
  • Anonymous Policy: This option can be used to specify policy for anonymous users on the SharePoint site. There is no change on this screen when compared to SharePoint 2010.
    
  • Permission Policy: You can use this option to manage permission policy levels in a web application. There is no change on this screen when compared to SharePoint 2010.
    
    

That’s all for Part 5 so far. In Part 6 we will discuss the “Monitoring” options. Stay tuned!