SharePoint 2013: How to Configure Your SharePoint Farm

When it’s the first time that you are installing and configuring SharePoint 2010 or 2013, the first question of SharePoint is “How do you want to configure your SharePoint farm?”
Actually for people or let’s says, administrators, the first answer is “NO”...
There are many reasons therefore:

We want to use Managed Accounts for our Service Applications
We want to give “friendly names to our databases and not use the GUID
…

But let’s take the example of a Junior SharePoint’er and click on “Yes, walk me through the configuration on my farm using this wizard”..

It will ask you to create a new managed account or to create a new managed account. Most of us, and I am not afraid to say it, are using the farm administrator as account for creating the service applications.
This IS NOT a best practice. Why?

Not all services needs Admin rights
Admin rights means : great security issue
…

But, this is well a “good manner” for

Avoid “Access Denied”
Avoid to see which service needs which account
…

Let’s say that we are using the Administrator Account …

It will ask you to choose with service to create and start. Please select all of them or only one you need..

Depending what you are selecting, it will take time for installing and configuring your services.
I selected everything and on a VM with 4gig RAM and i5 processor it takes 15 minutes.. (I know my VM is very slow :-) )

When SharePoint finishes creating Service Applications, it will ask you to select a Web Site Address and to choose a Site Template ..

There are many new templates, but if you want to use only the templates from 2010, because you are addicted to the 2010 like me, you have to change “2013” to “2010” and choose your template..

When SharePoint haves all his info, he will create you a site and show up a summary.

You can navigate to your website and made all the modification that you want

But again, when you are connecting to my SQL Server, you will see all your databases and, yeah it’s not sexy to see.. You will have on each database a GUID.

Also be careful when you create a new Web Application, SharePoint will standardly associate all the Service applications to your Web applications.
It will be nonsense to associate all the services if you create a Search Center.