SharePoint 2016 Central Admin - Security - Manage The Farm Administrators Group

When you click on the manage the farm administrators group Link, you will land on the Farm Administrators page. This page will let you manage the farm administrators.

Manage the farm administrators group’s direct link /_layouts/15/people.aspx?MembershipGroupId=3

In a company, there are many administrators who look after the SharePoint farm, and to give them proper permission so that they can do day to day activities, we have to manage farm administrator.

Farm Administrators group is special groups in SharePoint and part of SharePoint central admin. Member of this groups have full control of  SharePoint and those members called SharePoint administrators. As a farm administrator, you can manage service applications, web applications, manage the administrators of service application, manage the managed account and control the server attributes from Central admin. As a farm administrator, you can take control of the Site content.

Note

Being a member of farm administrators does not mean that you have full control of the content of sites unless you are part of the policy of web application.

On the manage the farm administrators group we can add new users or remove an existing user, we can change the group settings, view the settings or send the email to the members of groups.

We can perform the following operations in farm administrators

To add a user in the farm administrator group

Please follow the below steps to add a user into the Farm admin group.

• Login on central admin with user who is member farm administrator group and also local admin on the server.
• Click on New dropdown and Click on Add Users




• On new popup, please enter following information
  
  
  1. Enter name / id/ email address of the User.
  2. Check the send an email invitation checkbox
  3. Enter the text of the email if you want customize.
  4. Click Share
     
     
     
     If you click on the Share With option, you will see all the users/groups who are part of this group.
     
     
     
     
• Now the Waqas is part of farm administrator group and he will also get an email.

To remove a user in the farm administrator group

Please follow the below steps to remove a user from farm administrators group.

• Click the checkbox in front of the user which you want to remove.




• From the ribbon Click on Action dropdown and click on Remove Users from Group




• Click on the Ok from warning popup. (make sure you are removing the correct user).




• Now you will see that Waqas is no longer a part of farm administrator group.

Send Email to existing users

You can also send the email to existing users by following the below steps.

• Select the user on farm administrators group
  
  
  
  
• Click Action and Click E-mail Users




• In the pop up click Allow.




• This will install one of the applications which supports mailto address . i.e. outlook or mail depending on your os.

Note

If no user is selected or selected user doesn’t have any email address then you will get this error.

You can follow the same steps to send a text or call the farm administrator groups.

To Change Group Settings

We can also change the farm administrator group settings as we change other SharePoint groups. Please follow the below steps to manage the group settings.

• Click on the Settings and then Click on Group Settings
  
  
  
  
• Name you can change the group name ( I recommend leaving it as default).
• About Me you can change the description of the group and enter new or edit it
• Group Owner change the group owner ( default value is farm administrator group).
• View Membership you can select who can view the membership of this group. Select group members or Everyone.
• Edit Membership we can select who can edit the group membership from Group Owner to Group members.
• Allow Requests you can change the groups joining or leaving request by selecting Yes or No,
• Auto-Accept requests you can allow auto accept requests.
• If you allow auto-accept then you can specify the email address on which these request will be sent.
• Click Ok to save the settings.

To view Group Membership

You can view existing group membership of the farm administrator group.

• Click on the Settings dropdown and click on Group Membership.




• On the pop up you will see the url of central admin and permission level.

Make Default Group

You can make this group the default group of the site. Please follow the steps below to make it default group.

• Click on the Settings dropdown and click on Make Default Group.




• Click ok on the popup




• Now this group is the default group of the site.

In this article, we walk through different configuration settings of the farm administrator groups. We also walk through the steps in which we add a user into the group then remove a user from the group.