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Mastering the 70-321 Exam: Foundational Concepts and Farm Deployment

The Microsoft 70-321 Exam, formally titled "Deploying and Configuring Microsoft SharePoint 2010," was a cornerstone certification for IT professionals specializing in this powerful collaboration platform. Passing this exam demonstrated a candidate's core skills in planning, deploying, and managing a SharePoint 2010 farm. It was a critical step for individuals pursuing the Microsoft Certified IT Professional (MCITP): SharePoint Administrator 2010 credential. The exam focused squarely on the infrastructure and technical configuration aspects of SharePoint, rather than on development or end-user functionality.

This certification was designed for IT administrators, infrastructure specialists, and systems engineers tasked with the operational health of a SharePoint environment. The 70-321 Exam validated that a professional had the essential knowledge to build a stable, secure, and well-architected SharePoint farm from the ground up. It covered a wide array of topics, including the initial installation, the creation of the logical architecture, the configuration of critical backend services, and the implementation of security and monitoring strategies.

The scope of the 70-321 Exam was comprehensive, demanding a deep understanding of both the "how" and the "why" behind SharePoint 2010's architecture. Candidates were expected to be proficient not only in using the graphical Central Administration interface but also in leveraging the powerful SharePoint Management Shell (PowerShell) for automation and advanced configuration. This blend of theoretical knowledge and practical skill is what made the certification a respected benchmark in the industry.

For a professional's career, successfully passing the 70-321 Exam was a significant achievement. It provided verifiable proof of their expertise in a complex and widely adopted enterprise technology. This credential opened doors to specialized roles in SharePoint administration and was a clear indicator to employers that the certified individual possessed the necessary skills to manage a mission-critical business collaboration platform.

Understanding the SharePoint 2010 Architecture

A fundamental prerequisite for success on the 70-321 Exam is a solid understanding of the SharePoint 2010 server farm architecture. A SharePoint farm is a collection of one or more servers working together to provide SharePoint services. The architecture is typically organized into a three-tier model, which allows for scalability, security, and specialized roles for each server. A candidate must be able to describe these tiers and their functions.

The first tier is the Web Front-End (WFE) tier. These servers are responsible for handling incoming user requests from their web browsers. They host the Internet Information Services (IIS) websites that serve up the SharePoint pages, documents, and other content. In a multi-server farm, multiple WFEs are used to provide high availability and to distribute the user load. This is the tier that users directly interact with.

The second tier is the Application tier. These servers are the workhorses of the farm and are responsible for running the various backend services that provide SharePoint's functionality. This includes critical services like search indexing and crawling, user profile management, and managed metadata services. In larger farms, these services can be distributed across multiple application servers to optimize performance and provide redundancy.

The third and final tier is the Database tier. This tier consists of one or more servers running Microsoft SQL Server. The database servers host all the data for the SharePoint farm. This includes all the content from sites and documents, as well as all the configuration data for the farm itself. The health and performance of the SQL Server tier are absolutely critical to the overall performance of the SharePoint environment. The 70-321 Exam requires a deep understanding of this tiered model.

Planning Your SharePoint 2010 Deployment

Before a single piece of software is installed, a successful SharePoint deployment requires careful planning. The 70-321 Exam places significant emphasis on a candidate's ability to plan a deployment that meets specific business and technical requirements. This planning phase involves assessing the hardware and software prerequisites and designing an appropriate farm topology.

First, an administrator must ensure that all prerequisites are met. This includes provisioning servers with a supported version of the Windows Server operating system and ensuring that the correct roles and features, such as the .NET Framework and IIS, are installed. A dedicated, supported version of Microsoft SQL Server must also be deployed and configured to host the SharePoint databases. Failure to meet these prerequisites is a common cause of installation failures.

Next, the administrator must design the farm topology. The size and complexity of the topology depend on the organization's needs for capacity, performance, and availability. For a small deployment, a single server farm (with SQL Server Express) might be acceptable for a trial or development environment. For a small departmental solution, a two-server farm (one WFE/App server and one database server) might be sufficient.

For larger, enterprise-wide deployments, a multi-server farm is required. A medium-sized farm might consist of two WFEs, one or two application servers, and a clustered SQL Server backend. A large farm could have many servers in each tier, with specialized application servers dedicated to specific, high-load services like search. The 70-321 Exam expects you to be able to choose the appropriate topology based on a given set of requirements.

The Installation Process Explained

The actual installation of SharePoint 2010 is a multi-step process that requires careful execution. A detailed understanding of this process is a core objective of the 70-321 Exam. The process begins with running the SharePoint prerequisite installer. This tool automatically downloads and installs all the necessary Windows Server roles, features, and other required software components. This step greatly simplifies the initial server setup.

Once the prerequisites are in place, the main SharePoint setup program is run. This program copies all the necessary SharePoint binaries to the server. After the binaries are installed on all the servers that will be part of the farm, one server is chosen to create the new farm. This is done by running the SharePoint Products Configuration Wizard. This wizard is a critical tool that guides the administrator through the initial creation of the farm.

During the first run of the configuration wizard, the administrator will be prompted to create a new server farm. They will need to specify the database server to be used and provide credentials for a farm administrator account. The wizard will then create the central configuration database, which is the heart of the farm. After the first server has created the farm, the configuration wizard is run on all the other servers (the additional WFEs and App servers) to have them join the newly created farm.

The final step of the installation process often involves running the configuration wizard from the command line using the psconfig.exe tool, especially after applying software updates. A certified administrator must understand this entire workflow, from the prerequisite installer to running the configuration wizard, to successfully deploy and maintain a SharePoint farm.

Navigating Central Administration

After the farm is created, the primary tool for managing it is SharePoint Central Administration. This is a dedicated, web-based application that provides a graphical user interface for nearly all farm-level administrative tasks. Proficiency in navigating and using Central Administration is a fundamental skill that is thoroughly tested on the 70-321 Exam. It is the command center for the SharePoint administrator.

The Central Administration site is organized into several logical sections, each focused on a specific area of management. The "Application Management" section is used for tasks related to managing web applications, site collections, and service applications. This is where an administrator would go to create a new user-facing website or to provision a new backend service like search.

The "System Settings" section is used to manage the servers and services in the farm. Here, an administrator can see which services are running on which servers, manage email and mobile integration settings, and configure farm-wide settings. The "Monitoring" section provides tools for checking the health of the farm, reviewing diagnostic logs, and managing timer jobs, which are the scheduled background processes that perform many maintenance tasks.

Other key sections include "Security," for managing farm administrator accounts and service accounts, and "Backup and Restore," for protecting the farm's data. Spending significant time in a lab environment, clicking through each of these sections and understanding the purpose of the various settings and options, is an essential part of preparing for the 70-321 Exam. An administrator must be completely comfortable with this interface.

Introduction to the SharePoint Management Shell

While Central Administration provides a powerful graphical interface, the most powerful tool for a SharePoint 2010 administrator is the SharePoint Management Shell. The 70-321 Exam expects a candidate to understand the purpose of this tool and its importance for automation and advanced configuration. The Management Shell is an extension of Windows PowerShell that is automatically installed with SharePoint. It provides a command-line interface with over 500 specific SharePoint cmdlets.

The Management Shell can be used to perform nearly every administrative task that is possible in Central Administration, and many tasks that are not. It is the preferred tool for automating repetitive tasks, such as creating hundreds of new site collections or applying a specific permission setting to multiple sites. Writing a simple script in PowerShell is far more efficient than performing these tasks manually through the web interface.

The Management Shell is also essential for performing certain advanced configurations that do not have a corresponding option in the Central Administration GUI. It provides a much more granular level of control over the farm's settings. Furthermore, it is the standard tool for performing unattended installations and for scripting the deployment of a new farm, which is a key part of any enterprise deployment strategy.

For the 70-321 Exam, while you are not expected to be a PowerShell scripting expert, you must recognize its importance and be familiar with its basic usage. You should be able to identify the types of tasks for which PowerShell is the preferred or only tool. An effective administrator knows how to leverage both the simplicity of the Central Administration GUI and the power of the Management Shell to manage their farm efficiently.

Preparing for the 70-321 Exam: Core Principles

As you begin to prepare for the 70-321 Exam, it is important to build your knowledge on a solid foundation of core principles. The most critical principle is to master the concept of the SharePoint farm architecture. Before you dive into the details of service applications or security, you must have a crystal-clear understanding of the roles of the WFE, Application, and Database tiers, and how they work together. This architectural knowledge is the context for everything else you will learn.

Your initial study should focus on the planning and installation process. This is the logical starting point for building a farm and for your learning journey. Work through the prerequisites, understand the different farm topologies, and memorize the key steps of the installation process. The best way to do this is to build your own small farm in a lab environment. This hands-on experience is invaluable and will make the concepts much more concrete than simply reading about them.

Become intimately familiar with the two primary management interfaces: Central Administration and the SharePoint Management Shell. Spend time navigating every section of Central Administration to understand what is managed where. Open the Management Shell and practice running basic commands to get a feel for the syntax and the object model. Understanding the capabilities of both tools is essential for a well-rounded administrator.

By focusing on these foundational elements first—the architecture, the installation process, and the core management tools—you will create a solid framework in your mind. This will make it much easier to learn and understand the more complex topics that follow, such as the logical architecture and the service application framework, which are also critical for success on the 70-321 Exam.

The Core of Service Applications for the 70-321 Exam

A major architectural shift in SharePoint 2010, and a central topic of the 70-321 Exam, was the introduction of the Service Application framework. This framework represented a complete redesign of how backend services were managed compared to previous versions. In the older model, services were tied to a specific server farm and were difficult to scale or share. The new service application model provided a much more flexible, scalable, and independent way to provision and consume services.

A service application is an instance of a SharePoint service that can be deployed and managed independently. Common examples include the Search Service Application, the User Profile Service Application, and the Managed Metadata Service Application. Each service application typically consists of two parts: the service itself, which runs on an application server, and a dedicated database that stores the data for that service.

This new architecture provided several key benefits. First, it allowed for greater scalability. An administrator could dedicate specific servers to run specific, high-load service applications, like search, without impacting other services. Second, it provided a high degree of administrative autonomy. The settings and configuration for each service were managed independently within that service application's own administration interface.

The most powerful benefit, and a key concept for the 70-321 Exam, was the ability to share service applications across different server farms. An organization could set up a dedicated "services farm" that hosted all the key service applications. Other "content farms" could then connect to this central farm and consume its services. This model, known as inter-farm service sharing, greatly improved resource utilization and simplified management in large, multi-farm deployments.

Deploying and Configuring Search Services

The Search service is one of the most critical and complex components of a SharePoint 2010 farm. Its configuration and management are a significant part of the 70-321 Exam curriculum. The Search Service Application is responsible for all aspects of search, from discovering and indexing content to handling user queries and returning results. A well-configured search service is essential for ensuring that users can find the information they need across the enterprise.

The architecture of the search service is based on several key components. The "Crawl Component" is responsible for connecting to content sources, such as SharePoint sites, file shares, or websites, and fetching the content to be indexed. The "Crawl Database" stores the history and status of these crawl operations. The "Query Component" is responsible for receiving user search queries, processing them, and retrieving the results from the index.

The "Index" itself is stored in a series of files on an application server and is managed by the "Indexing Component." This is the core data structure that allows for fast and relevant search results. The "Property Database" stores all the metadata, or properties, that have been extracted from the crawled content. All these components work together, and their placement on different servers can be configured to optimize search performance and scale.

An administrator is responsible for configuring the Search Service Application. This includes defining "Content Sources" to tell the crawler what content to index. It also involves setting up "Crawl Schedules" to define how often the content should be re-crawled to keep the index up-to-date. Understanding these components and configuration tasks is a fundamental requirement for the 70-321 Exam.

Managing User Profiles and Social Features

SharePoint 2010 introduced a rich set of social and collaboration features, and these were all powered by the User Profile Service Application (UPA). A deep understanding of the UPA is a key objective of the 70-321 Exam. The UPA is the central repository for rich profile information about all the users in the organization. It goes far beyond the basic information stored in Active Directory, allowing for custom properties like skills, projects, and interests.

The primary function of the UPA is to synchronize user information from various business directories, with Microsoft Active Directory being the most common source. An administrator must configure a "Synchronization Connection" to tell the UPA how to connect to Active Directory, which organizational units to import users from, and how to map the properties in Active Directory to the properties in the SharePoint user profile.

Once the profiles are imported, the UPA powers several key features. The most prominent of these is "My Sites." A My Site is a personal site for each user that acts as their central hub for collaboration. It includes a profile page where they can share information about themselves, a personal document library, and a newsfeed where they can follow the activities of colleagues and documents.

The UPA also drives other social features, such as organization charts, tagging, and expertise finding. For the 70-321 Exam, a candidate must understand the purpose of the UPA, the high-level steps for configuring profile synchronization from Active Directory, and the relationship between the UPA and user-facing features like My Sites.

Understanding Managed Metadata Services

Another groundbreaking feature introduced in SharePoint 2010, and a critical topic for the 70-321 Exam, is the Managed Metadata Service. This service application provides a centralized, hierarchical taxonomy service for the entire farm. It allows an organization to create and manage a formal, controlled vocabulary of terms that can be used to tag content consistently across all sites. This is a powerful tool for improving content discoverability and information governance.

The Managed Metadata Service is based on a few key concepts. A "Term Set" is a collection of related terms. For example, you might have a term set for all the departments in the company. A "Term" is an individual word or phrase within a term set (e.g., "Finance," "Marketing," "Human Resources"). These terms can be organized into a hierarchy. The entire collection of term sets is stored in a "Term Store."

Once the taxonomy is defined in the Term Store, it can be used throughout SharePoint. An administrator can create a new "Managed Metadata" column in a list or library. When users upload documents, they can then tag them with the official terms from the central term store. This ensures that everyone is using the same, consistent terminology, which dramatically improves the quality of search and filtering.

The Managed Metadata Service also supports "Enterprise Keywords," which allow users to add their own informal tags (folksonomy) to content. These keywords can later be reviewed by a taxonomist and promoted to become part of the formal managed term sets. Understanding the purpose of managed metadata, the concept of term sets and terms, and its role in content classification is essential.

Creating and Configuring Web Applications

The content that users interact with in SharePoint is hosted within a structure called a Web Application. A web application is a fundamental logical construct in SharePoint, and its creation and configuration are core skills tested on the 70-321 Exam. At a technical level, a web application is an IIS website that is configured to be used by SharePoint. It has its own application pool in IIS, which provides process isolation, and its own set of configuration settings.

An administrator creates a new web application from Central Administration. During the creation process, they must specify several key settings. This includes the port number and host header for the site, the authentication method that will be used (e.g., Claims-based or Classic), and the name of the content database that will be created to store all the data for the sites within this web application.

A key concept related to web applications is the use of "Zones." A single web application can be extended to up to five different zones, with each zone having its own separate IIS website and its own URL. The common zones are Default, Intranet, Extranet, Internet, and Custom. This allows the same content to be exposed to different audiences with different authentication settings. For example, the Intranet zone might use Windows authentication for internal employees, while the Extranet zone might use Forms-based authentication for external partners.

Every web application must have at least one content database, and a large web application can have many. An administrator is responsible for managing the size and number of these content databases to ensure good performance. A deep understanding of what a web application is, how to create one, and the purpose of zones is a mandatory piece of knowledge for the 70-321 Exam.

A Deep Dive into Site Collections and Sites

Once a web application is created, it serves as a container for hosting one or more Site Collections. The concept of a site collection is a critical part of the SharePoint logical architecture and a key topic for the 70-321 Exam. A site collection is a set of websites that have the same owner and share administrative settings, such as permissions and storage quotas. It is the highest-level unit of content that an administrator can manage and is the boundary for many features and security settings.

Every site collection has a single, top-level site. Below this top-level site, users with the appropriate permissions can create a hierarchy of subsites. While a farm can have many site collections, each site collection is a self-contained unit with its own content database (though a single content database can hold multiple site collections). This structure allows for the delegation of administration, where the owner of a site collection can manage their own sites without needing farm-level administrative privileges.

When an administrator creates a new site collection, they must specify its URL, its owner, and a "Site Template." The site template defines the initial structure and content of the site collection. SharePoint 2010 comes with a wide range of built-in site templates to support different business purposes, such as a Team Site for collaboration, a Publishing Portal for corporate communications, or an Enterprise Wiki for knowledge management.

An administrator is also responsible for managing the resources used by a site collection. This is done through "Quota Templates." A quota template allows the administrator to set limits on the total amount of storage a site collection can consume and to define a warning level. This is an important governance feature that prevents any single site collection from using a disproportionate amount of the farm's storage resources.

Business Connectivity Services (BCS) Explained

SharePoint is a powerful platform for managing internal content, but much of an organization's critical data resides in external, line-of-business systems like CRM or ERP databases. Business Connectivity Services (BCS) is the SharePoint 2010 service application designed to bridge this gap. Understanding the purpose of BCS is an important objective of the 70-321 Exam. BCS provides a framework for connecting to and interacting with data from these external systems directly within the SharePoint interface.

BCS allows an administrator or a developer to define an "External Content Type." An external content type is a reusable definition of how to connect to an external data source, such as a SQL Server table or a web service. It defines the structure of the external data and the operations that can be performed on it (e.g., read, create, update, delete).

Once an external content type is defined, the external data can be surfaced in SharePoint in several ways. The most common way is to create an "External List." An external list looks and feels just like a regular SharePoint list, but its data is coming live from the external system. Users can view, sort, filter, and even edit the external data directly from the SharePoint list, and the changes are written back to the source system in real-time.

BCS also allows for the external data to be integrated with other SharePoint features. For example, the data can be included in search results, and user profiles can be augmented with information from an external HR database. BCS is a powerful tool for creating composite solutions that combine the collaboration features of SharePoint with the structured data from other enterprise systems.

The SharePoint 2010 Security Model for the 70-321 Exam

Security is a paramount concern in any enterprise collaboration platform, and the SharePoint 2010 security model is a deep and critical topic for the 70-321 Exam. A certified administrator must have a thorough understanding of the different layers of security and how they work together to protect the farm and its content. The security model can be thought of as a series of concentric circles, starting with the infrastructure and moving inward to the individual items in a list.

At the outermost layer is the infrastructure security. This involves securing the physical servers, the operating system, and the SQL Server database. This includes standard IT practices like applying security patches, using firewalls, and following the principle of least privilege for all service accounts. The 70-321 Exam expects an administrator to understand the importance of securing the underlying platform that SharePoint runs on.

The next layer is the farm-level security. This is managed in Central Administration and involves controlling who has access to administer the farm itself. The "Farm Administrators" group is the most powerful role in SharePoint, and membership in this group must be tightly controlled. This layer also includes the management of the service accounts that are used to run the application pools and SharePoint services.

Finally, the innermost and most complex layer is the content security. This is the model that controls who can access the sites, lists, libraries, and individual items. This layer is based on a sophisticated system of users, groups, permission levels, and securable objects. A deep understanding of this content authorization model is perhaps the most important security topic for any SharePoint administrator.

Claims-Based Authentication Explained

One of the most significant architectural changes in SharePoint 2010, and a mandatory area of study for the 70-321 Exam, was the introduction of Claims-Based Authentication. This new model provided a much more flexible and extensible way to handle user identity compared to the traditional methods used in previous versions. Understanding the concept of claims is fundamental to modern SharePoint security.

In the claims-based model, a user's identity is no longer just a simple account name (like DOMAIN\user). Instead, it is a bundle of information called "claims." A claim is a statement about a user, such as their email address, their role in the company, or their employee ID. When a user authenticates, a trusted identity provider packages these claims into a secure "security token," which is then presented to SharePoint. SharePoint trusts the identity provider and uses the claims in the token to make authorization decisions.

This model decouples SharePoint from the underlying user directory. SharePoint no longer needs to know how to talk directly to Active Directory or another membership database. It simply needs to trust an identity provider. This makes it much easier to support a wide variety of authentication scenarios. For the 70-321 Exam, you must be able to contrast this new claims-based model with the older "Classic Mode" authentication, which was a simpler model that was maintained for backward compatibility.

The move to claims was a strategic decision that aligned SharePoint with modern identity management standards. It provided the foundation for supporting scenarios like federated identity, where users from a partner organization could log in using their own corporate credentials. A deep conceptual understanding of what a claim is and how the claims-based authentication flow works is essential.

Configuring Authentication Providers

Because of the flexibility of the claims-based model, a SharePoint 2010 administrator can configure several different types of authentication providers to meet various business needs. The 70-321 Exam requires you to be familiar with these different providers and their primary use cases. The configuration of authentication is done at the web application level, meaning that different web applications can use different authentication methods.

The most common provider for internal, corporate environments is Windows Authentication. When using claims, this means that SharePoint will trust Active Directory as the identity provider. When a user accesses a site, their browser will automatically present their Windows credentials, and Active Directory will issue a token containing claims based on their user account and group memberships. Within Windows Authentication, an administrator must understand the difference between NTLM and Kerberos, with Kerberos being the more secure and recommended protocol.

For scenarios involving external users, such as partners or customers, Forms-Based Authentication (FBA) is a common choice. FBA presents the user with a custom login form where they can enter a username and password. These credentials are then validated against a separate user store, such as a SQL Server database or an LDAP directory. This allows for the management of external user accounts without having to create them in the corporate Active Directory.

For more advanced federation scenarios, SharePoint 2010 can be configured to use a SAML-based identity provider. This allows SharePoint to trust a dedicated security token service, such as Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS). This is the mechanism that enables users from a completely separate, trusted organization to access SharePoint resources using their own credentials.

Managing User Authorization

Once a user has been authenticated, the next step is authorization: determining what that user is allowed to do. The SharePoint 2010 authorization model is a key topic for the 70-321 Exam. It is a flexible but complex system based on the principle of assigning permissions to users and groups for specific securable objects, such as sites, lists, libraries, and even individual items.

The best practice for managing permissions is to use SharePoint Groups. A SharePoint Group is a collection of users. Instead of assigning permissions to individual users, an administrator assigns them to a group. This makes the management of permissions much more scalable and easier to maintain. SharePoint provides several default groups, such as "Owners," "Members," and "Visitors," but custom groups can also be created.

Permissions themselves are not assigned directly. Instead, they are bundled together into Permission Levels. A permission level is a collection of individual rights, such as "View Items," "Edit Items," or "Create Subsites." SharePoint comes with default permission levels like "Read," "Contribute," and "Full Control." An administrator can also create custom permission levels to meet specific business requirements.

The authorization process works by granting a specific permission level to a SharePoint group for a particular site or list. For example, you might grant the "Contribute" permission level to the "Team Members" group on the "Project Alpha" team site. Any user who is a member of that group would then have the rights to add, edit, and delete items on that site. A deep understanding of this model of users, groups, and permission levels is fundamental.

Securing the Farm and its Services

In addition to securing the content, a SharePoint administrator is responsible for securing the farm's infrastructure and its services. This is an important aspect of the knowledge required for the 70-321 Exam. A core principle of farm security is the use of least-privilege for service accounts. Each service in SharePoint, such as the application pools in IIS or the User Profile Synchronization service, should run under a dedicated, domain user account that has only the specific permissions it needs to function.

Membership in the farm administrators group must be tightly controlled. Users in this group have complete control over the entire SharePoint farm, including the ability to manage all service applications and web applications. This role should be reserved for a very small number of senior SharePoint administrators. Day-to-day site administration should be delegated to site collection administrators, who have full control over their own site collection but no access to Central Administration.

The security of the service applications themselves must also be managed. Each service application has its own access control list. An administrator must explicitly grant permissions to web applications to consume a particular service application. This allows for granular control over which sites can use which backend services. For example, you could configure the Search service so that it can be used by all web applications, but a more specialized Business Connectivity Services application can only be used by a specific finance portal.

Securing the physical servers is also part of the administrator's responsibility. This includes following standard server hardening guidelines, limiting who can log on to the SharePoint servers, and ensuring that all communication between the servers in the farm, especially to the SQL Server, is secured.

Configuring SSL for Web Applications

Encrypting web traffic is a fundamental security practice, especially for any website that handles sensitive information or is accessible over the internet. The process of configuring Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) for SharePoint web applications is a key practical skill for an administrator and a relevant topic for the 70-321 Exam. SSL provides encryption for the data that is transmitted between the user's web browser and the SharePoint web front-end server, protecting it from eavesdropping.

The process begins with obtaining an SSL certificate from a trusted Certificate Authority (CA). This certificate is then installed on each of the Web Front-End servers in the SharePoint farm. Once the certificate is installed on the servers, the administrator can configure the binding in Internet Information Services (IIS). This involves creating an HTTPS binding for the SharePoint IIS website and associating it with the newly installed SSL certificate.

After the IIS configuration is complete, the final step is to configure SharePoint to be aware of the new SSL-enabled URL. This is done through a process called Alternate Access Mappings (AAM). AAM is a SharePoint feature that allows a single web application to be associated with multiple URLs. The administrator would configure the AAM settings to map the public HTTPS URL to the correct web application and zone.

Properly configuring SSL is essential for protecting user credentials and sensitive data. The 70-321 Exam will expect you to understand the high-level steps involved in this process: obtaining and installing a certificate, configuring the binding in IIS, and updating the Alternate Access Mappings in SharePoint Central Administration. This demonstrates a core competency in securing the user-facing aspects of the SharePoint farm.

Day-to-Day Operations for the 70-321 Exam

Beyond the initial deployment and configuration, a significant part of a SharePoint administrator's role involves the day-to-day operations and maintenance of the farm. The 70-321 Exam requires a candidate to be knowledgeable in these routine but critical tasks that are necessary to keep the environment healthy, performant, and reliable. These operational activities form the core of the ongoing management of a live SharePoint deployment.

These tasks include monitoring the health of the servers and services, managing background processes known as timer jobs, and reviewing system logs to proactively identify and address potential issues. An administrator is also responsible for managing storage capacity, ensuring that the content databases do not grow uncontrollably, and that there is sufficient disk space for all the farm's components.

Regularly performing backups of the farm's configuration and content is another fundamental operational duty. This ensures that the system can be recovered in the event of a failure. Finally, an administrator must manage the patching and updating of the SharePoint farm, applying the cumulative updates and service packs released by Microsoft to keep the system secure and supported.

A deep understanding of these operational disciplines is a key indicator of a competent administrator. The 70-321 Exam will test your knowledge of the tools and procedures used to perform these tasks, ensuring that you are prepared not just to build a farm, but to successfully operate and maintain it over its entire lifecycle.

Leveraging the Health Analyzer

To assist administrators in proactively managing the health of their farm, SharePoint 2010 includes a powerful built-in tool called the Health Analyzer. A thorough understanding of the Health Analyzer and its purpose is a key topic for the 70-321 Exam. The Health Analyzer is a system of predefined rules that periodically run to check for potential configuration, performance, and security problems in the farm.

These health rules cover a wide range of best practices. For example, there are rules that check if the servers are running low on disk space, if the databases have become too large, if the service accounts are using the correct permissions, or if certain security settings have not been configured correctly. Each rule is designed to detect a specific, common issue that could impact the stability or performance of the farm.

When the Health Analyzer finds a problem, it creates an alert item in a list within Central Administration. This alert provides a clear description of the problem that was found, explains why it is a potential issue, and, most importantly, provides a recommended action for the administrator to take to resolve it. In some cases, the system can even fix the problem automatically with a single click.

The Health Analyzer is an administrator's first line of defense in identifying and resolving issues. Regularly reviewing the Health Analyzer reports is a critical proactive maintenance task. For the 70-321 Exam, you must be able to describe the purpose of the Health Analyzer, how it works, and the types of problems it is designed to detect.

Understanding and Managing Timer Jobs

Many of the routine maintenance, cleanup, and processing tasks in SharePoint are performed by scheduled background processes called Timer Jobs. A solid understanding of timer jobs is essential for any administrator and is a topic covered in the 70-321 Exam. Timer jobs are responsible for a huge variety of tasks, from the very simple to the very complex.

For example, there are timer jobs that synchronize user profile information, that crawl content for the search index, that gather usage analytics data, and that check the health of the farm using the Health Analyzer rules. Nearly every major service and feature in SharePoint relies on one or more timer jobs to function correctly. These jobs are scheduled to run at different intervals, such as every minute, hourly, daily, or weekly, depending on their function.

An administrator can manage and monitor timer jobs from Central Administration. The "Timer Job Status" page provides a list of all the scheduled jobs and shows their last run time and outcome. The "Job Definitions" page allows an administrator to view the details of each job, change its schedule, or run it immediately on an ad-hoc basis.

Occasionally, a timer job may get "stuck" or fail to run correctly, which can cause problems with the associated feature. For example, if the profile synchronization timer job is not running, new users from Active Directory will not appear in SharePoint. An administrator must know how to monitor the status of these jobs and how to troubleshoot them when they fail. This is a core operational skill.

Monitoring and Analyzing Usage and Logs

When troubleshooting a problem in SharePoint, an administrator's most valuable resource is the diagnostic logs. A key objective of the 70-321 Exam is to understand how to work with the SharePoint Unified Logging Service (ULS) logs. ULS is a powerful, high-performance logging system that captures detailed trace information from every component in the SharePoint farm. When an error occurs, the ULS log is the first place to look for a detailed error message and a correlation ID.

The ULS logs are written as text files to the file system of each SharePoint server. These files can be large and difficult to read directly. Therefore, an administrator would typically use a tool to view and filter them. Central Administration has a basic log viewer, but the more powerful approach is to use the Merge-SPLogFile cmdlet in PowerShell. This command can gather the log entries from all the servers in the farm for a specific timeframe and consolidate them into a single, filtered file for analysis.

In addition to the diagnostic ULS logs, SharePoint also collects usage and health data. This data is written to a dedicated logging database and can be used to generate reports on the farm's performance and how it is being used. An administrator can view reports on things like the most popular sites, the average page load times, and the most common search queries.

This usage data is valuable for capacity planning and for understanding how users are interacting with the system. For the 70-321 Exam, you should be able to differentiate between the diagnostic ULS logs (used for troubleshooting) and the usage and health data (used for reporting and analytics) and know the primary tools used to access each.

Comprehensive Backup and Recovery Strategies

Protecting the data in a SharePoint farm is one of the most critical responsibilities of an administrator. The C_HANATEC142 Exam requires a thorough understanding of the native backup and recovery tools and strategies available in SharePoint 2010. A robust backup plan is essential for recovering from hardware failures, data corruption, or human error. SharePoint provides a flexible set of tools to perform backups at different levels of granularity.

The most comprehensive type of backup is a full farm backup. This captures the entire farm, including the configuration database, all the content databases, and the service application databases. A farm backup is the recommended approach for a full disaster recovery scenario. This type of backup can be performed using either Central Administration or the SharePoint Management Shell (PowerShell).

For more granular protection, an administrator can also perform backups of individual components. For example, it is possible to back up a single web application, a specific service application, or, most commonly, an individual site collection. Site collection backups are particularly useful as they allow an administrator to restore a single site without having to restore an entire database.

The backup and recovery strategy should be tailored to the specific business requirements for recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO). The plan should be regularly tested to ensure that the backups are valid and that the recovery process works as expected. A candidate for the 70-321 Exam must be familiar with these different backup types and the tools used to perform both the backup and the restore operations.

Restoring SharePoint Content

Having a valid backup is only half the battle; an administrator must also be proficient in performing the restore operations. The 70-321 Exam will test your knowledge of the different restore options and when to use them. The type of restore that is performed depends on the type of failure that has occurred and the type of backup that is available.

For a catastrophic failure where the entire farm is lost, the recovery process involves building a new farm with the same patch level as the original and then performing a full farm restore from the farm backup. This process will restore the configuration database and re-attach all the content and service application databases.

For less drastic failures, more granular restore options are available. If a single content database becomes corrupt, it can be restored from a SQL Server backup and re-attached to its web application. If a user accidentally deletes an entire site collection, the administrator can restore just that site collection from a site collection backup or from a backup of its content database.

SharePoint 2010 also introduced the Recycle Bin, which provides a level of self-service recovery for end-users. When a user deletes a document or a list item, it goes into the site's Recycle Bin. The user can restore the item themselves from here. If it is deleted from the first-stage Recycle Bin, it goes to a second-stage Recycle Bin that is managed by the site collection administrator. Understanding this multi-layered approach to recovery, from full farm restores to the end-user Recycle Bin, is essential.

Patching and Updating a SharePoint Farm

Keeping a SharePoint farm up-to-date with the latest software patches is a critical maintenance task for security and supportability. The process for patching a multi-server SharePoint 2010 farm is specific and must be followed carefully to avoid causing an outage. An understanding of this process is a key operational skill tested on the 70-321 Exam. Patches are typically released by Microsoft as Cumulative Updates (CUs) or Service Packs.

The patching process involves two main phases. The first phase is the "binary update" or "software update" phase. In this phase, the patch installer is run on every server in the SharePoint farm (all the WFEs and all the Application servers). This updates the SharePoint binary files on the file system of each server. At this point, the farm is in an inconsistent state, as the files have been updated but the databases have not.

The second phase is the "database update" or "build-to-build upgrade" phase. After the binaries have been installed on all servers, the administrator must run the SharePoint Products Configuration Wizard (or the psconfig.exe command-line tool) on each server, one at a time. This wizard detects that the binaries are newer than the databases and initiates the process of updating the schemas of all the SharePoint databases to match the new version.

This two-phase process must be followed meticulously. All servers must be patched with the binaries before the configuration wizard is run. Failure to follow this procedure can result in a broken or unsupported farm. For the 70-321 Exam, you must be able to describe this two-phase update process and understand the role of both the patch installer and the configuration wizard.

Conclusion

While SharePoint 2010 provides a rich set of features out-of-the-box, many organizations extend its functionality with custom code and third-party solutions. An administrator is responsible for managing these customizations, and this is an important topic for the 70-321 Exam. SharePoint 2010 introduced a new model for managing customizations that provided more flexibility and control than previous versions.

The primary mechanism for deploying customizations is the Solution Framework. A solution is a package (a .wsp file) that contains all the components of a customization, such as custom web parts, event receivers, or branding files. SharePoint 2010 supported two types of solutions: Farm Solutions and Sandboxed Solutions. A farm solution is deployed globally to the entire farm and its code runs with full trust. This is a powerful but potentially risky model.

To provide a more secure and isolated way to deploy customizations, SharePoint 2010 introduced Sandboxed Solutions. A sandboxed solution is deployed to a specific site collection and its code runs in a restricted, isolated process. The system monitors the resources consumed by the sandboxed solution and can shut it down if it is consuming too many resources or causing performance problems. This model is ideal for user-developed or less-trusted customizations.

An administrator is responsible for managing the lifecycle of these solutions. This includes uploading the solution package to the farm's solution gallery, deploying it to the appropriate web applications or site collections, and retracting or upgrading it as needed. The 70-321 Exam requires you to understand the difference between farm and sandboxed solutions and the high-level process for managing them.

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