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Ok, so although I love almost everything about SharePoint 2010 relative to SharePoint 2007, one of the things that I don’t really like is the Central Administration home page. I just can never find the links that I constantly use quickly and I don’t find the navigation very user friendly in terms of logically finding what you need. This is probably due to the fact that I am so used to SharePoint 2007 Central Administration.

I know Microsoft has provided a Resources links web part which you can use to manually add the links you constantly use but it’s too bad this wasn’t automatically pre-populated with the Central Administration links you most constantly use or with the most commonly used links throughout the Central Administration.

The links that I constantly use are all of the Service Applications along with a few others like “Manage web applications”, “Manage services on server”, among some others.

So what I have done is created a feature called the SharePoint 2010 Central Administration Resource Links Generator that I think will be useful for all SharePoint 2010 Administrators and consultants who are constantly going through SharePoint installs and those that constantly use Central Administration. It auto generates quick links on your Central Administration home page.

This feature can be configured to:

1. Automatically populate the SharePoint 2010 Central Administration “Resource” list with all of the links to the service applications on your farm
2. Automatically populate the SharePoint 2010 Central Administration “Resource” list with links that you configure in the feature yourself

In my Resources list, by default, it adds links to the following (in alphabetical order):

1. Access Services
2. Business Data Connectivity Service
3. Create site collections
4. Enterprise Search Service Application
5. Excel Services Application
6. Manage services on server
7. Manage web applications
8. Metadata Service Application
9. PerformancePoint Service Application
10. Secure Store Service
11. User Profile Service Application
12. Visio Graphics Service
13. Word Automation Services
14. WSS Usage Application

If you don’t want to have the feature automatically add all the service application links or you want to customize it to have your own links, you can also do that via configuration.

Summary

The latest release and solution installer files can be downloaded in the downloads section here:

http://sp2010resourcelinks.codeplex.com/releases/view/61240#DownloadId=209357

The source code and deployment files have been uploaded to the Codeplex source code and downloads section.

Please log any issues on Codeplex and please provide feedback there as well. I welcome any feedback for improvements. Also, if you would like to contribute to this Codeplex project, let me know.

Please note that you should use this at your own risk, as it does modify the Central Administration web site collection and as always note my “works on my machine” disclaimer.

Note that the feature is installed as a hidden, site collection level, global feature,so you won’t be able to browse to the site actions –> site settings –> site collection features and activate/deactivate it there, instead you will have to run the Solution Installer tool that I have included in the release or activate/deactivate it using powershell on the Central Administration site collection:

Enable-SPFeature SP2010CAResourceLinkGenerator_ResourceLinks -Url http://server:port/site/

Also note that I have written a deactivation mechanism so that it will remove all the links on feature deactivation or package uninstall if you would like to clean up the resource list of these links that this feature has added.

The installation and configuration instructions can be found on my blog at: http://www.khamis.net/blog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=57