Create a Web Application and Site Collection in SharePoint 2013 Preview

We continue our journey in exploring what SharePoint 2013 Preview has to offer and in today’s post I will be providing you with a step by step guide in creating your first SharePoint 2013 Web Application and Site Collection to host your subsites.  In the last two posts, I provided you with instructions on installing SharePoint 2013 Preview on a Windows 2012 Server with SQL 2012 as our database server.  If you need to catch up on my previous posts in this series, you can access them from the following links below;

1. Installing SharePoint 2013 Preview on Windows 2012 Server with SQL 2012-Part 1
2. Installing SharePoint 2013 Preview on Windows 2012 Server with SQL 2012-Part 2

We finished off our last post by not proceeding with the configuration wizard and opted to cancel as we will be configuring the service applications individually.

Prerequisites

We first need to provision an account in Active Directory to be used as our service account Application pool id when provisioning our SharePoint 2013 web applications.  I have labelled it as sp_webapp but you can call it whatever you desire.  This is a standard domain user account with no additional privileges and will be the App pool id for content web apps. which we will provision later in this article.

In DNS we also need to create an A record entry for the fully qualified domain name of our web application.  I have labelled it as “intranet” and this will point to our SharePoint 2013 server.

To create our “A” record in DNS, navigate to our  Windows 2012 server which hosts the DNS server role and launch Server Manager and then click on Tools > DNS Manager. Expand your Forward Lookup Zones and create a new “A” record and enter “Intranet” as the Host Name and then enter the IP address of our SharePoint 2013 server.  Please note, we are adding a new “A” record and not a CNAME (Alias) record and the name could be anything.  I am using Intranet in this example.

Creating our first SharePoint 2013 Web Application

Let’s begin by navigating to the SharePoint 2013 Central Administration > Application Management page.

You will notice that the UI is fairly similar to that we have been accustomed to in SharePoint 2010.

The first thing we need to do is create our first Web Application to host our Site Collections and its sub sites.

Under the heading “Web Applications” click on Manage web applications.

Click on New

The below splash screen is unexpected from Microsoft, but it is notifying us in a somewhat candid way that the page is about to load.  I wonder if this will be deprecated in the final release of SharePoint 2013.

You will finally be greeted with the all familiar “Create New Web Application” modal dialog window with a few subtle additions.  I will post separate screen captures depicting our settings as we scroll down the modal dialog box presented and will explain each of these settings in some detail.

We will click on Register new managed account.  We will not be utilising the sp_farm account and register our sp_webapp domain account that we created earlier.

Click OK

Unfortunately, after clicking OK, our previous entries made are erased (same behaviour in SharePoint 2010), so you will need to begin from the top again)

Ensure you have selected the sp_webapp account as your Application Pool ID.

Ensure your Database Name and Authentication method is correct.

IIS Web Site:

Create a new IIS web site

Name: SharePoint – intranet.corp.gkhalil.com (Always best practice to create a new IIS website for each new SharePoint Web Application.)

Port: 80

Host Header: Leave Blank or specify a preferred host header. (If you specify a host header, the alternate access mapping will be created for you automatically.  Please ensure that you also create the relevant A record in DNS. e.g. intranet.corp.gkhalil.com which we have done above.

Path: Leave default C:\inetpub\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories\80 (This is usually determined by Port number and or Host Header Input)

Security Configuration

Allow Anonymous: No

Use Secure Sockets Layer (SSL): No

Claim Authentication Types

Enable Windows Authentication: Integrated Windows authentication (NTLM)

Sign in Page URL

Default Sign In Page – selected

Public URL: e.g. http://intranet.corp.gkhalil.com:80

Zone: Default

Application Pool

Create new Application pool: SharePoint -intranet.corp.gkhalil.com80

Configurable: CORP\sp_webapp (register the newly created service account as a managed account)

Database Name and Authentication

Specify your Database Server, Database Name and keep Windows authentication selected which is recommended.

Failover Server

This was first introduced in SharePoint 2010 providing you with the ability to specify a second SQL server that is participating in database mirroring, allowing you to easily failover if the primary SQL server fails. This was and still is a welcome addition providing a means of high availability.

Service Application Connections:

Edit the following group of connections: default

Note, SharePoint 2013 as was the case in SharePoint 2010 allows you to connect a web application to all service applications available in a farm or a subset that you define.  This can be changed at any time.

Customer Experience Improvement Program

Enable Customer Experience Improvement Program: Yes or No

Click OK

Click OK

Our newly created Web Application will now be listed along side our SharePoint Central Administration Web Application under Central Administration > Application Management > Manage web applications

Creating our first SharePoint 2013 Site Collection

We are now ready to create our first site collection.  Navigate to Central Administration > Application Management > Create Site Collections

Ensure that the newly create Web Application is selected.

Enter a Title for your Site.

Select your Template.  You will notice that there is a 2013 and 2010 Template experience version on offer.  I am selecting 2013 and the all so common Team Site.

Enter your primary and secondary site collection administrators

Then Click OK

Our first site collection is up and running and as you can see from above, the procedure in doing so is identical to that in SharePoint 2010.

Click OK.

You should now be able to successfully  navigate to your newly created  site, in my instance it is http://intranet.corp.gkhalil.com

NB: If you are constantly being prompted for credentials you will need to do two things.  Firstly, you will need to add the fully qualified domain name website to the Local Intranet zone by following this TechNet article.  Secondly, if you are accessing the site from the Server itself, doing the above alone will not fix your issue.  You will need to make a registry change following this TechNet article.  As best practice, I did not disable the loopback check and followed method 1 – Specify host names which is the preferred method if NTLM authentication is utilised.

That is it!  As you can see from the below screen shot of the Team Site Home page, there has definitely been some changes and enhancements made to the look and feel.

It’s definitely exciting times ahead for all you SharePoint fans out there, and make sure you subscribe to this blog and join our Facebook and Twitter Pages to keep to date with the latest articles as they are published.  In future articles, we will continue to focus our efforts in configuring our SharePoint 2013 farm and its service applications.

If you require any assistance with your SharePoint or other IT needs, the team at GKM2 are happy to assist.  You can contact us via info@gkm2.com.au or 1300 797 288 within Australia.

Articles in this series – Installing SharePoint 2013

• Part 1 – Installing SharePoint 2013 Preview on Windows 2012 Server with SQL 2012-Part 1
• Part 2 – Installing SharePoint 2013 Preview on Windos 2012 Server with SQL 2012 – Part 2

Technical Resources

• Getting Started with SharePoint 2013 for IT Pros http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/fp142366.aspx
• Overview of SharePoint 2013 Preview installation and configuration  http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee667264(v=office.15)
• Install SharePoint 2013 Preview http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc303424(v=office.15)