Microsoft Sharepoint Products and Technologies Resource Kit eBook

Chapter 7: Architecting SharePoint Products and Technologies for Operating System Topologies 151
■ Anonymous authentication
■ Basic authentication
■ Integrated Windows authentication
■ Certificate authentication (using Secure Sockets Layer)
All these methods are available regardless of the type of domain to which the
front-end servers belong.
Administrative Rights
Two sets of users are allowed to perform administrative functions for Windows
SharePoint Services: members of the administrators group for the local server computer
and members of the SharePoint administrators group. The SharePoint administrators
group is a domain group that is registered with Windows SharePoint
Services. The SharePoint administrative group is not created by default. The user
who installs Windows SharePoint Services can create this group during installation,
and it can contain a domain group, local user, or domain user.
Members of this domain group can perform Central Administration tasks
without having to be given administrator rights to the local server computer. This
is particularly useful in a server farm, because you can grant rights across the
server farm rather than individually for each computer in the server farm. This is
also useful for applications that call the administrative object model for Windows
SharePoint Services. If the application process can be configured to run as a member
of the SharePoint administrators group, it can create new sites, modify quota values
for sites, and so on.
There are some operations that members of the local administrator’s group can
perform that members of the SharePoint administrator’s group cannot perform.
These tasks include:
■ Configuring the SharePoint Central Administration virtual server
■ Enabling full-text search
■ Extending virtual servers in Windows SharePoint Services
■ Managing content databases (i.e., changing properties, etc.)
■ Managing paths (inclusions/exclusions)
■ Running the stsadm.exe command-line utility
■ Setting the configuration database properties
■ Setting the default content database server
■ Setting the SharePoint Administration Group
■ Removing Windows SharePoint Services from a virtual server