Introducing Service Applications

SharePoint 2007 had the concept of shared service provider or SSP, which was a single web application in which you configure various important services for SharePoint such as user profiles and search. SSPs suffered with a few limitations:

• You could not appoint administrators on a per-service-level.

• The services of an SSP could not be shared across farms, and the SSP was a concept available only in SharePoint server.

• One web application could be managed by only a single shared service provider at a given time.

This has seen a significant improvement in SharePoint 2010 in the form of the managed services concept. Each service is an individually manageable entity. This has the following advantages:

• You can now appoint administrators on a per-service basis.

• These users are then given access to Central Administration. However, they can manage only the designated service.

• Rather than providing all the services to a given site you can now assign specific services to a site. The administrator can pick and choose which services are made available to which websites.

• Farms can share services. This opens up immense scalability options and also a great deal of flexibility in the overall architecture considering things such as security, availability, and so on.

• One other point to consider is that not every service is shareable. You can also alter your custom services and, depending on the nature of the service, if it makes sense to share it you have the ability to share it.

To access the service applications browse to Central Administration, Application Management, Manage Service Applications under the Service Applications section. You see the list of service applications as shown in Figure 2.5.

Figure 2.5. Service applications