Feature Comparison Between SharePoint Foundation 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010 for Farm Administrators (part 2)

Reviewing the Central Administration Tools on the Home Page in SharePoint Foundation 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010

Whereas the previous section calls out the service applications that come with SharePoint Foundation 2010 and the Standard and Enterprise editions of SharePoint Server 2010, which directly impact the tool sets that the user community will have, this section covers the administration tools that the farm administrators will have access to from the home page of the Central Administration site. A simple overview is that SharePoint Server 2010 provides a larger number of management tools, and therefore more time and training is needed to ensure that farm administrators are comfortable with the full range of tools. This is not an insignificant point because many IT resources are overburdened and may not be able to take time off to attend training and so might very well have to educate themselves on these tools.

SharePoint Foundation 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise Administration Tools Compared

Table 2 compares the tools that are available from the home page for the Central Administration site for SharePoint Foundation 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise. A quick glance at the table will show that the toolsets are fairly similar, suggesting that farm administrators have roughly the same suite of tools to access when managing their farms.

One difference is a lack of several reporting tools in SharePoint Foundation 2010, as shown in the table, because SharePoint Foundation 2010 doesn’t include the View Web Analytics Reports. Also SharePoint Foundation 2010 doesn’t provide the ability to configure content deployment paths and jobs or to manage form templates.

Comparing the Monitoring Tools in SharePoint Foundation 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise

If the Monitoring link is clicked from the Central Administration home page, and the tools further compared, it can be seen that SharePoint Foundation 2010 provides a subset of the monitoring tools that SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise provides.

SharePoint Foundation 2010 provides the following tools that overlap with SharePoint Server 2010:

• Configure Diagnostic Logging

• View Health Reports

• Configure Usage and Health Data Collection

SharePoint Foundation 2010 does provide several reports out of the box that will be of interest to the farm administrator. The Health Reports, by default, list only the slowest pages and top active users. The Configure Usage and Health Data Collection capabilities are the same for SharePoint Foundation 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010 enterprise, and allow the farm administrator to log the following events: Content Import Usage, Content Export Usage, Page Requests, Feature Use, Search Query Usage, Site Inventory Usage, Timer Jobs, and Rating Usage.

SharePoint Foundation 2010 does not provide the following reporting tools that both SharePoint Server 2010 Standard and Enterprise offer:

• View Administrative Reports

• Review Information Management Policy Usage Reports

• View Web Analytics Reports

The default Administrative reports include CrawlRatePerContentSource, CrawlRatePerType, QueryLatency, QueryLatencyTrend, and SharePointBackendQueryLatency. The Web Analytics reports provide metrics on items such as Total Number of Page Views, Average Number of Page View per Day, Total Number of Daily Unique Visitors per Day, and other metrics, as shown in Figure 9. Note that when the Analyze tab is selected, the farm administrator has the option to filter by criteria such as Preceding Day, Preceding 7 Days, Preceding 30 Days, and under the More drop-down menu, 90, 180, 365, or Custom Dates. This allows the farm administrator to get an “instant” overview of high-level activities transpiring on the farm, and she can also export these to a spreadsheet it desired.

Figure 9. Web Analytics report for a SharePoint site collection.

Comparing General Application Settings in SharePoint Foundation 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise

Although the home page of the Central Administration site shows similar features and tools available between SharePoint Foundation 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise, there are some revealing differences in the General Application Settings page, as shown in Table 3. The only tools provided in SharePoint Foundation 2010 are the External Service Connections tools and the SharePoint Designer settings tool.

SharePoint Server 2010 Standard and Enterprise provide numerous other tools such as InfoPath Forms Services (Enterprise edition only), Site Directory, Search, and Content Deployment tools. InfoPath Forms Services allows farm administrators to make InfoPath forms available via the web browser to SharePoint users, and these users do not need to have InfoPath available on their desktops. The Site Directory tool allows the farm administrator to define a site directory, which is a site that captures new site collections, which is helpful in larger organizations where there may be hundreds or thousands of sites created, and grouping them in logical subgroups can make navigation much easier for end users.

As mentioned in the “Search in SharePoint Foundation 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010” section,both SharePoint Foundation 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010 provide basic search tools, but SharePoint Server 2010 provides a number of additional management tools that may be of interest during the architecture and design process. The General Application Settings page provides access to a selection of farm-level search settings, such as proxy server, timeout, and the option to ignore Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) warnings. In addition, crawler impact rules can be set here, which allow the farm administrator to fine-tune how many documents are requested at a time from sites being crawled by SharePoint Server 2010.

Finally, content deployment is also only included in SharePoint Server 2010 Standard or Enterprise, and is used to deploy content from one site collection to another site collection. This is typically used by organizations who create content in one tier (for example, a staging tier), and then publish it regularly to a production tier, which could house the production intranet portal, or to an external Internet-facing farm that houses an Internet website. Content deployment requires the creation of paths and jobs, which can be full or incremental.