TechNucleus

Most of you already know that SharePoint gives you the ability to crate and host multiple separate web applications,for example, intranet site, internet/Extranet, Team site, etc. In MOSS 2007, Microsoft comes with a new concept of Shared Services Providers(SSP). The idea behind this concept is to manage and share certain services centrally instead of each web application level. The best examples are Profiles and Search service. Using Profile service, you can import all of the user information from Active Directory once and then use  that data within different web applications. In the same way you can also setup the search service one time and then share it across multiple web applications. It make prefect sense, right?

The major services that are handled by SSP are,

• Profiles
• Search
• Indexing
• My Sites
• Audiences
• Excel Services
• Business Data Catalog (BDC)

Another major advantage of SSPs is separation of roles. It is most common in medium to large server farms to have one group administrating the physical servers and another group maintain search/profiles. Since SSP is its own site collection, you can define a user access so that they can not access Central Administration site but they can access the SSP. Even in SSP you can limit then what they can access.

As a general rule, you use single SSP. But there are some scenarios you may want to create multiple SSPs. For example, you may need separate set of permissions and services for intranet site and extra net site. You have to be vary cautious about creating multiple SSPs.

Final Thoughts

Shared Service Providers (SSPs) are one of the great feature in MOSS 2007. Creations of SSPs should be part of your initial planning. In SSPs, You can grant permissions at a granular level or broad access.

I hope this was useful and you understand clearly what’s the purpose of SSPs?