In this exercise you will create a new SharePoint site collection using the SharePoint 2010 Central Administration site.
1. Make sure you are logged in as the local administrator.
2. Navigate to the SharePoint 2010 Central Administration site. You can do this using the shortcut inside the Administrative Tools menu of the Windows Start menu. On this VM you can also get to the SharePoint 2010 Central Administration site by opening the browser and navigating to the following URL:
http://YourServerNameHere:2010/default.aspx
3. Explore the various pages of the Central Administration site by clicking the links in the Quick Launch bar such as Application Management, System Settings and Monitoring. This should give you an idea of how the Central Administration site breaks up management tasks into different functional areas.
4. Click on the Application Management link in the Quick Launch bar to navigate to the Application Management page. Inside the Site Collections section of this page, you should see several links for creating and managing site collections. Click in the link titled View all Site Collections which takes you to a page which shows you the site collections currently existing on the Web Application at http://intranet.contoso.com. By clicking on the individual site collections on the left, you should be able to view information about each site collection on the right of the page. You should observe that the VM has a few existing site collections in this Web Application.
5. Now it is time to create a new site collection. Click on the Application Management link in the Quick Launch bar and then click on the link in the Site Collections section titled Create Site Collections. Once you have done this you should be at a page that allows you to enter information for creating a new site collection. Enter the following information so that your screen looks like the screenshot shown below and then click OK to begin the provisioning process to create a new site collection.
a. Title: Contoso Sales Site
b. Description: My first SharePoint 2010 site collection
c. Url: http://intranet.contoso.com/sites/Lab01A
d. Template: Team site (this template is in the Collaboration tab)
e. Primary Site Collection Administrator User Name: YOURDOMAIN\Administrator
f. Secondary Site Collection Administrator User Name: (leave blank)
g. Quota Template: No Quota
Create Site Collection
6. After the site collection provision process is complete, you should a page as the one shown below. Click on the provided link to navigate to new site.
Site Collection successfully created
7. When you see the newly-provisioned site collection with a Team site as its top-level site, move on to the next exercise.
Home page of the new site collection
