Creating your first Web Application & Site Collection in SharePoint 2010

SharePoint 2010 Central Administration / Application Management. You will notice that the redesigned interface organises and categorises items in an orderly fashion, with a lot of familiarity with SharePoint 2007.

The first step in the process is creating your first Web Application to host our Site Collections.

Under the section Web Applications, click on Manage web applications.

On the new fluent ribbon UI, click on New.  (By the way, I think the ribbon UI is a welcome addition to the 2010 interface making it easier for administrators and end users to make decisions and change details within a couple of clicks).

The all so familiar Create New Web Application window appears albeit as a pop up window which does make navigation a lot nicer.

There are a couple of enhancements and improvements worth noting, with the first being the two types of authentication that you are provided with when creating your new web application, being Claims Based Authentication vs. Classic Mode Authentication. In summary, SharePoint 2010 is now “claims aware” making SharePoint a lot easier to work with systems such as Active Directory and providing single sign on for on-premises and cloud based applications across organisations. The following link provides a great overview on Claims Based Authentication and the role it will play within SharePoint 2010.

http://blogs.technet.com/ritaylor/archive/2009/06/03/claims-based-authentication-an-overview.aspx

Proceed and fill out the Create New Web Application Form. As a guide, I have provided sample answers below .

Authentication: Claims Based Authentication

IIS Web Site:

Create a new IIS web site

Name: SharePoint Intranet Portal (Always best practice to create a new IIS website for each new SharePoint Web Application.)

Port: 80

Host Header: Leave Blank or specify a preferred host header. (If you specify a host header, the alternate access mapping will be created for you automatically.  Please ensure that you also create the relevant A record in DNS.

Path: Leave default C:\inetpub\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories\80 (This is usually determined by Port number and or Host Header Input)

Security Configuration

Allow Anonymous: No

Use Secure Sockets Layer (SSL): No

Identity Providers

Enable Windows Authentication: Negotiate (Kerberos or NTLM)

Sign in Page URL

Default Sign In Page

Public URL

Keep default Entry against your Default Zone.

Application Pool

Create new Application pool: SharePoint Intranet Portal (I have matched the pool name against my IIS website name for consistency, again it’s best practice to create a new application pool for each SharePoint Web Application that you create.

Database Name and Authentication

Specify your Database Server, Database Name and keep Windows authentication which is recommended.

Failover Server

This is a new feature in SharePoint 2010 providing you with the ability to specify a second SQL server that is participating in database mirroring, allowing you to easily failover if the primary SQL server fails. This is a welcome addition providing a means of high availability.

Service Application Connections:

Edit the following group of connections: default

Note, SharePoint 2010 allows you to connect a web application to all service applications available in a farm or a subset that you define.  This can be changed at any time.

Customer Experience Improvement Program

Enable Customer Experience Improvement Program: Yes or No

Click OK to initiate the creation process.

Click OK

Our new Web Application will now be listed along side our SharePoint Central Administration v4 Web Application under Central Administration/ Application Management / Manage web applications

We are now ready to create our first site collection. Navigate to Central Administration / Application Management / Create Site collections.

As you can see, the interface hasn’t changed at all from SharePoint 2007.

Ensure that the newly created Web Application is selected.

Enter a Title and Description. Under Template Selection I will click on the Collaboration Tab and select the trusty Team Site as this will be my starter site hierarchy for my development Intranet Portal.

Enter the Primary and Secondary Site collection administrators and then click OK.

That’s it. Our first site collection is up and running.

This is only the beginning of our journey.  In upcoming posts I will delve into the nitty gritty and get my hands dirty discussing the new features of SharePoint 2010.

This concludes our series on getting the basics of SharePoint 2010 up and running and will serve as a base for all future posts on introducing SharePoint 2010.  So stay tuned and be notified on upcoming posts by subscribing to my 
 
Refer By:  http://sharepointgeorge.com/2009/creating-web-application-site-collection-sharepoint-2010/