Sharepoint 2013 : New Installation and Configuration - Configuring Your SharePoint Farm

The SharePoint Farm Configuration Wizard (called the “White Wizard” in some circles, as opposed to the “Gray Wizard,” which is the Products Configuration Wizard) walks the administrator through configuration of the farm. As with any wizard, SharePoint makes certain assumptions to guide you. If you are looking for a more hands-on tailored configuration setup, then you must perform configuration manually. The wizard saves you most of the complications of manual configuration but makes default configuration decisions on your behalf.

The first page of the Farm Configuration Wizard asks if you want to participate in a Customer Experience Improvement Program—a worthwhile exercise if you have not done this before. Skipping this dialog takes you to the page with a wizard summary and the chance to cancel the wizard or begin the process, as shown in Figure 1.

Click the button to start the wizard, and you should see the page shown in Figure 2. The top section of the page allows you to specify the service account for all Managed Services, created by the wizard. Use the DOMAIN\sp_service account . You may be tempted to use the SharePoint farm account to run your services. Microsoft recommends supplying a dedicated service account, with lesser privileges than the farm account.

The remainder of the page, shown in Figure 2, allows you to configure the various Managed Services included in the default service group of the farm. Service groups allow you to define different groups of services for different purposes. For example, a publishing web site might need only a restricted set of services provisioned, whereas a corporate intranet might require many more services, such as the Office service applications. SharePoint 2013 insists on a default group of services, which SharePoint applies to any web application created where you have not specified a service application group (more on this in a later section on creating web applications).

Select your desired default service applications and then click the Next button. If you are unsure what service applications you need by default, it is always safe to err on the side of minimal. Typical service applications to include are (do not worry for now if you are unsure of the purpose of each of the listed service applications).

• Managed Metadata Service
• App Management Service
• Application Discovery and Load Balancer Service Application
• Search Service Application
• State Service
• Secure Store Service
• Secure Token Service Application

By now, you will have noticed that SharePoint 2013 has a similar look and feel to Microsoft Windows 8 User Interface (previously known as Metro). Microsoft has taken some tips from Google and made its applications friendlier, and SharePoint 2013 now gives you a nice friendly “Working on it . . . ” message, as shown in Figure 3.

After completing the configuration of farm services, the farm wizard prompts you to configure the top-level root site collection, as shown in Figure 4. At this stage, SharePoint has already provisioned a new IIS Web Application—called SharePoint 80—on the default HTTP port (80) and presented the page shown in Figure 4 so the user may choose the site definition (template) for the new site collection at the root of this new application. Administrators of the previous SharePoint 2010 version may already be familiar with creating new site collections, and the following page is similar to that of the previous version.

After creating the default site collection, the farm wizard should show a summary completion page. The summary page lists the URL of the default site collection and the various service applications configured in the farm. To change the default web application, site collection, and service applications, visit the Application Management section in the Central Administration site.