Salman's Blogs

Continue from part – 1, if we want to use windows authentication we can select this option on this part of screen. SharePoint team recommends Negotiate (Kerberos or NTLM). If you want to enable form base authentication then you can select the option to enable ASP .Net Membership and Role Provider.

If you are using ‘Custom Based Authentication’ you can define a custom login page. You need to give the url of login. Public URL part is same as SharePoint 2007. You can extend your web application later for other zones. For example if you want to extend your site for internet access, you can extend your site using internet zone.

In this section you can configure application pool and security account for application pool. If you are creating first application or if you have not registered any managed account. Then before using configurable account you need to register managed account from the given link. In my case this is the first web application, so I will register a managed account.

Next section is the same as in SharePoint 2007 to configure content database.

Now there is a new option for failover database support. You can find more details here (Failover Database Support).

In next screen you can add remove service application connections for your web application.

Now in SharePoint 2010, services concept has been shifted from Share Services Provider (SSP) to the service application. You can read this article from Andrew Connell for more details. By default all web applications are associated with the farm’s Default group of service application connections, although you can change this setting. Here you can see my article that how you can create a custom set of service application connections.

Now the last section is about Costumer Experience Improvement Program.

This is the optional field. If you opt-in to the Customer Experience improvement Program, anonymous data about how you use SharePoint 2010 are uploaded to Microsoft occasionally in the background.

Cheers

This article is for the beginners in SharePoint 2010, if you are thinking to create a new web application in SharePoint 2010, here is the step by step description of all the steps. If you have already done this using SharePoint 2007, it’s not much difference except a few things.
Open SharePoint 2010 central admin, you can open it directly from the URL if you remember that or from the start menu under the SharePoint 2010 Technologies tab. It will open like this.

If you have upgraded from SharePoint 2007 you will see new user interface here. It’s almost the same but new color schemes and a lot of AJAX. One thing is also to notice that now ribbon is everywhere. You will see ribbon on all the pages. You can see in future posts that you can hide it as well. To create new web application click on the ‘Manage Web Application’ link under ‘Application Management’.

Here you can see the ribbon on top of the page. This page will display all the web applications you have already created. On top left there is a option for ‘New’ on the ribbon. You need to click it to open create new web application dialog. When you click on new, you will see AJAX working on SharePoint 2010. One thing you must remember that you need a really fast machine with plenty of RAM (memory) on it. As recommended by SharePoint 2010 team, you need at least 4GB RAM. If you are running on less than that it will be really slow. Here is the AJAX screen.

After a few seconds you can see this ‘Create New Web Application’ screen. It will be a pop up, not like the new page loading in the same window of central admin. I think it’s just to give SharePoint 2010 new look.

Come to the point, first thing to configure is authentication type. Here SharePoint 2010 has introduced a new authentication type. ‘Claims Based Authentication’. I have a small article on the introduction to Claims Based Authentication. From there you can get some idea that what is new here. If you are happy with classic authentication then you can use ‘Classic Mode Authentication’. It will work the same as in SharePoint 2007.
After that it’s the same old stuff, for IIS web site. I will recommend you to use new IIS web site. You can change the name and also you can change the port. You can also define any host header. For example if you like to run your site on a URL like http://mysharepoint2010site/ , you can give this value in host header. By default it create web site in wwwroot directory and use port number as site directory name. You can also change it. Then you can select anonymous access or SSL.

Continue on Part – 2