…eh long live services ‘a la carte’ – somebody from marketing really needs to get hold of that one! (and please excuse my French).
What it means is this -
In SharePoint 2007 the Shared Services Provider was a specialist web application (two if you include MySites) which looked after Enterprise Search, Profiling, Excel Services and the Business Data Catalog.
Although this worked pretty well it had a couple of major limitations -
- It’s not a scalable model – you could have more than one SSP in a server farm but if the desire was to have a slightly different flavour of SSP, for example specialist or restricted search it was a lot of overhead.
- It wasn’t granular – SSP’s had very coarse permissions, once a site was attached to an SSP it had all the services running on it. Administrators either had access to the SSP configuration site and all services or they didn’t!
No finesse at all!
The new Service Application Model is broken into discreet service applications allowing web applications to be more finely tailored to their user base.
This is done through a series of proxies which are assigned into Proxy Groups. In a straight 2010 installation there will be a Default Proxy Group which web applications will automatically take on. Services can belong to more than one group and (wait for it) more than one instance of a service can be running in a farm. So for example the Excel Services service Finance uses may not be the same as the one in use by Marketing.
Naturally, you can create your own Proxy Groups.
This does come at cost, more granular services means more information to keep in state which results in more databases for the SQL Server and the associated maintenance attached to that. To take the People service, which runs MySites in 2010 amongst other things, as an example (albeit an extreme one); this service requires 3 databases to operate.
And it’s not alone with those hard disk eating, processor stomping needs…