In this
article I would like to experiment with Central Administration web
application.
About Central
Administration
The SharePoint Central Administration is a
website used for:
·
Application Management (Web Application, Sites,
Lists, Services etc.)
·
Monitoring (Job Status, Problems
etc.)
·
Security
·
Application Settings, System
Settings
· Performing
Backup/Restore
·
Configure Search, Services, Migration Assisting
etc.
In summary the Central Administration is the
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:

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

Now
we are ready to explore web applications. Before that we need to
go through the hierarchy of web application, sites etc.
Hierarchy
Following is the
hierarchy of SharePoint Farm, Web Application, Site Collection, Site, Lists and
Documents.

Following
is the description of the items in the above image:
Server
Farm: Server Farm contains multiple components like SharePoint
server, Database server providing multiple Web Applications spanned over
multiple machines. For development machines one single machine can
support all the components.
Web Application:
Web Application contains multiple Site Collections.
This could be equivalent to an ASP.NET
application.
Site Collection: Site
Collection contains multiple Sites
Site:
Site contains Lists, Documents etc.
Viewing
existing Web Applications
On installation, there are 2 web
applications by default:
1.
SharePoint Port 80 which is the user facing
one
2. SharePoint
Central Administration meant for Administrators
To view the web
applications, click on the Manage web applications link under
Applications Management category. You can see the following
screen:

Please
note the URLs for each 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.