WhAt’S IN thIS chAPtER?
What happened to Shared Services Providers?
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Service application basics
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Administering service applications
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Multi-tenancy in SharePoint 2010
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Put your thinking cap on. This chapter is going to plunge you headfi rst into the depths of SharePoint service applications. On the surface, they are pretty straightforward — heck, you can just run a wizard to get started — but truly unlocking their power takes a bit more effort.
Service applications are the way SharePoint 2010 provides most of its services. Think of some- thing like Search or Excel Services. These are offered as individual services that can be consumed in a variety of ways. Out with the rigid Shared Services Providers and in with the fl exible service applications.
Groups, connections, proxies, services, delegated administrators — what is all of that stuff?
As with most things technical, terminology is critical; and unfortunately, once you learn the key SharePoint terms, you will fi nd that half of them have a doppelganger in Windows PowerShell. Ugh.
However, once you have a grip on the terminology and the plumbing, it’s time for the fun part.
After looking at the fundamentals in Central Administration and then strolling through some of the key cmdlets, you’ll be ready to get your hands dirty.
Then once you think you have things under control, you learn a new trick. Some of the service applications can be confi gured to be multi-tenant, meaning that a specifi c instance of the service application can be set up in a way that makes each site collection think it is using a dedicated service, when in reality they are sharing.
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Get excited. You may think this chapter will be boring, but it’s a non-stop thrill ride through one of the most important pieces of SharePoint.
FAREWELL tO thE ShAREd SERvIcES PROvIdER
If you are familiar with MOSS 2007, then you know all about those lovely things called Shared Service Providers (SSPs). They enabled services to be packaged and provided in MOSS. An SSP consisted of Search, Profiles, Audiences, and My Sites; and if you were cool enough to have the Enterprise CAL, then they also brought Excel Services and the Business Data Catalog (BDC) to the party. You would then associate one or more SharePoint web applications with the SSP to consume these services. The web application had to get all of its services from one SSP, which caused scaling nightmares for many administrators.
For example, suppose you currently host your intra- net at http://intranet and it is associated with the Enterprise SSP. Then Human Resources comes to you and says they need to have their own, iso- lated copy of the BDC to protect their data. First you would have to create for them a unique web application, http://hrweb. Then you would have to create an HR-only SSP and associate their web application with the new SSP. Then you could set up the BDC. The only problem is that when you create the new SSP, you also get a new instance of all of those
other services, like Search, as shown in Figure 7-1. If HR would like to be able to search, then you have to configure Search for this SSP because they could not associate their web app with the corpo- rate SSP and its Search index. You can see how this could quickly become a black hole of redundant services and duplicate data.
In SharePoint 2010 this is no longer the case. Instead, all of those individual services can stand on their own as service applications. Table 7-1 shows the list of the service applications available and some information about them.
tAbLE 7-1 Service Applications
ShAREPOINt FOuNdAtION SERvIcE APPLIcAtIONS
has database cross‑Farm capable
Business Data Connectivity Yes Yes
Usage and Health Data Collection Yes No
Web Analytics No Yes
Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Subscription Settings Service
Yes No
Enterprise SSP Search Profiles BDC
. . .
Http://intranet
HR Only SSP Search Profiles BDC
. . .
Http://hrweb FIguRE 7-1
farewell to the shared services Provider ❘ 169
ShAREPOINt SERvER 2010 StANdARd SERvIcE APPLIcAtIONS
has database cross‑Farm capable
Managed Metadata Service Yes Yes
Search Yes Yes
Secure Store Service Yes Yes
State Service Yes No
User Profile Service Yes No
ShAREPOINt SERvER 2010 ENtERPRISE SERvIcE APPLIcAtIONS
has database cross‑Farm capable
Access Service No No
Excel Service No No
Visio Graphic Service No No
Word Automation Services No No
PerformancePoint Service No No
Note that service applications are part of all the SharePoint 2010 editions, including Foundation.
This is great news for administrators and should help reduce some of the previous inconsistencies in administering SharePoint.
The best way to think about service applications is take the old SSP and explode it out so that each piece stands alone. So instead of buying a combo meal, now you can get the burger, fries, and drink separately — and if for some reason you want two drinks and no fries, that’s fine too. Everything is ala carte. To put that in SharePoint terms, we can return to the example described earlier.
Currently, your company uses http://intranet for all SharePoint sites. For security reasons, the Human Resources group wants to have its own BDC, so you begin by creating a web application for them, http://hrweb. Then you provision a new BDC service application named HR only BDC.
Now you can associate http://hrweb with that service application and all of the other service applications, as shown in Figure 7-2.
As you can see, now HR has access to all of the same service applications as before, including the Enterprise BDC, and they have their own BDC. The other Intranet users are unaffected in terms of access; they are merely excluded from the HR only BDC, thus giving HR its desired isolation.
What was such a huge nightmare in the previous version of SharePoint is now a piece of cake in SharePoint 2010. Even better, the service application architecture is infinitely configurable. Of course, as you already know, infinitely configurable also means it can be infinitely complex. Fear not; this chap- ter will help you work through those infinite loops.
Search
Farm Service Applications
Excel
Services BDC User
Profiles
HR Only BDC
Http://intranet Http://hrweb FIguRE 7-2
SERvIcE APPLIcAtION FuNdAmENtALS
Before you can begin to work with service applications it is important to get a handle on all of the pieces involved and how they interrelate. There are a series of connections and associations to get from your web application to search results and the better you understand the pieces the easier it is to wire it all together.