TechNucleus

Yes there are no more Shared Service Providers (SSPs) in SharePoint 2010. This is One of the most interesting and powerful thing in SharePoint 2010. For users who are not familiar with SSPs in SharePoint 2007, you can read my previous post here.

What’s wrong with SSPs?

SSPs were vary handy in SharePoint 2007. They allowed us to share different services like profiles, audiences, search, Excel Services and BDC with different web applications. The problem is if we want to use same search service across multiple web applications but we want to have a totally different profile or BDC configuration. To achieve this functionality, the only option we have is to create a new SSP and duplicate the search service configuration/settings. In feature if we want to make any changes to search service, we have to do it in two places and It’s a hassle.

Some of the major problems with SSPs,

• SSPs are not built on Core services (WSS) and it built on SharePoint Server.
• SSPs are non extensible other than Microsoft SharePoint Team.
• SSPs are tied to a single farm. Technically Shared-farm SSPs are possible, but it tricky.

What’s the new approach?

In SharePoint 2010 Shared Service Provides(SSPs) are replaced by Service Applications. So what ever services existed in SSPs are still exist but have been unboxed and don’t have dependencies to each other. In the new version, there are over 20 service applications built using the service application framework. All of these service applications can run independently and each service has its own database (that’s why you see many databases in SQL Server compare to SharePoint 2007). If we want, we can also built our own service application (its is a very advance topic you can find a nice video here), it’s that much flexible.

Since each service run independently,the new service application framework removes the restriction, which says, “a web application could only be associated with a single SSP”. Now web applications can consume services on a individual basis and can use any combination of the available service applications.

If one of the service has high demand, we can easily scaled out across farms.

Summary

• Web application can be configured to only use a subset of deployed services.
• You can deploy multiple instances of the same service in a farm by giving the new service instances unique names.
• You can also share services across multiple web application.