As we move into the land of Office365 and SharePoint in the cloud, time to look at the key areas of Administration available to site collections. It’s very important for existing SharePoint Administrators working in SharePoint 2010 in server land to understand these areas. Working on SharePoint 2010 in the cloud presents not different, but new possibilities and management potentials.

In Office365, before the home page of the Administration section for the SharePoint platform, you have a number of options. Let’s take a basic look at them:

Manage site collections

A SharePoint site collection is a group of related Web sites organized into a hierarchy. A site collection often shares common features, such as permissions, content types, and consistent navigation, which can be managed together.

In Office365 SharePoint, you can create two types of Site Collections. These are Public and Private facing web sites. The Public facing web site is great for those organisations which need to provide a front window on their business, highlight their products or offers. The Private facing web site is perfect for those within the company to collaborate together and keep secure content.

I’ve got a public facing site collection (you’re in it now J ) and a private site. Both are managed in the administration section. In there can be set things like quotas,

Configure InfoPath Forms Services

InfoPath Forms Services enables users to open and fill out InfoPath forms in a browser without requiring Microsoft InfoPath installed on their computer. Using the SharePoint Administrator you can define whether User Browser enabled form templates are available and rendering capabilities, and you scan set Exempt User Agents that can receive InfoPath forms as XML files instead of web pages.

Configure InfoPath Forms Services Web service proxy

The InfoPath Forms Services Web service proxy enables communication between InfoPath Forms and Web services. Here you can use a proxy for data connections between InfoPath forms and Web services.

Manage User Profiles

The User Profile service provides a central location where administrators can configure user information, including user profiles, organization profiles, and My Site settings. The SharePoint Administrator is basically the User Profiles Application that you would see in the Central Administration for SharePoint 2010. It includes the typical sections such as People management, definition of Organizational properties, profiles and subtypes. It also includes the My Site settings covering all the options like personalization, links, social tags and notes, host locations etc.

Manage Term Store

A Term Store contains a set of related keywords (called managed terms) organized into a hierarchy of information, such as a well-defined product category or materials list, that you can then use to control the entry of list values. A Term Store helps improve the consistency, reliability, and discoverability of information within a site collection. This is the MetaData Term Store Application and includes import and administration.

Over the next few weeks I will be adding more blogs and articles concerning what functionality there is when working with each of these areas.