Sharepoint 2013 Administration Part A

This is the first installment in a blog post series about administering Microsoft Sharepoint 2013 based on what I learn from the video training course by Infinite Skills on this subject. The collection of servers that runs Sharepoint in conjunction with other software can vary enormously. For example you can run upto 5 instances of IIS or internet information server and don't forget many of these will be virtual servers run on different partitions but on the same hard drive and/or the same computer server. Sharepoint specifically runs sharepoint sites but these may only be part of a company website and in turn may contain sub sites and we call the whole of this a site collection. If you look in services on server it tells you what services are running and you can uncheck or check them to turn them on or off although you must choose the custom option first. A proxy server is a service that acts as a middleman between 2 services or programs that don't communicate directly with each other. Sharepoint as with generally the software it works with is 64 bit only and it works with Windows Server 2008 R2 & 2012, it also works with SQL Server 2008 R2 & 2012. Updated software will work with 2012 R2 of both these softwares. It doesn't support single label domain names and will normally have some kind of extension to the name. When you first connect to SQL Server or structured query language server the first thing you do is check your user name and password are correct and click connect. It will also have at least 4 system databases configured automatically by default but unlike earlier versions must be configured to work the idea being you have to harden it against things like viruses and make it secure. To do a simple install of Sharepoint you select install software prerequisites. This contains the additional software needed to work with Sharepoint. You have to install a program called splash separately. Then you install Sharepoint and if you do a complete installation it installs the full product but if you do a standalone installation it is the lesser express version. You need a password and a passphrase which has been a security feature since the 2010 version. The rest of the set up is pretty much automated although the computer will reboot several times. If you use the configuration wizard it will make the process easier but is apt to give the databases automatic but strange names with lots of numbers and this can cause confusion. Many users opt for the manual install where they can specify the names.