In the 2nd SharePoint Saturday Vietnam, I was honored to speak about how to plan and design Service Application Architecture in order to meet business requirements. This topic focused on the new capabilities of Service Application, which kicked Share Service Provider out of SharePoint 2010 and then “attacked” the design of logical Service Application architecture. I had intended to write the basics of this process after my speech but I haven’t had time until now.
I’m humbled to say that the topic is level 100 ITPro. Also, I recommend that you use some of the great resource that I've added to the last topic.
I've split my topic into four parts:
Share Services Provider made SharePoint administrator dizzy
I would like to invite you to go back in time to 4 years ago when we were welcoming the new capabilities and improvement in MOSS 2007 as well as hearing “good-bye SharePoint Portal Server 2003” from IT enthusiasts. I spent around 30 minutes rummaging through information of Shared Service in SharePoint Portal Server 2003, which is indispensable to IT geeks. I know that you were happy after you heard about the release of MOSS 2007, which had a number of great improvements in comparison to those of SharePoint Server Portal 2003. Did you want to forget Shared Service at that time? It looks as if we were Italia football fanatics, who loved Juventus FC as well as Del Piero, Pavel Nedved, Buffon until one event, which was Calciopoli, created a stir among football folks. Then would you would forget the players and then switch to Premium League? “Farewell, farewell, fare well Shared Service….” Just kidding…Am I reminding you of Shared Service Provider in MOSS 2007? Of course, I want you to think of it again. Take your time in order to revise Shared Service Provider again.
How does SSP make SharePoint administrator dizzy? Ok, nothing is perfect. I mean that there are pros and cons in SSP. Maybe, I should say that pros are what you like as well as cons are what you dislike. As you know, MOSS 2007 provided the SSP to deploy a number of productivity services, such as Business Data Catalog, which allows you to connect to an external system, or Excel Service, Office SharePoint Server Search etc. Do you think that SSP is monolithic? I mean that all your productivity services must be available to all Web application. In other words, you can’t have a separate service for one Web application. For example, if your Finance department wants access your financial analysis, revenues by using Excel Service and your Marketing department needs access to BDC in order to connect Dynamic CRM, you must provide each department employee with access to both in the farm. This wastes resources and limits the security functionality in your organization.
Are you beginning to feel uncomfortable after what I mentioned. Let me keep showing what a SharePoint administrator should know and acknowledge the truth of SSP. You only have one SSP for each farm, which means you manage a single possible failure. If your SSP fail, all users will lose all functionalities of SSP. It’s a truth that you should acknowledge.
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Are you beginning to feel uncomfortable after what I mentioned. L"font-size:12px;">What elseeeeee?!!?
Adventuring Service Applications in SharePoint 2010
In the previous section, we discussed what SSP made SharePoint administrator dizzy. In this section, I will give you medicine, which will cure your dizziness. Would you like it?
Above all, SharePoint 2010 provides more Service Applications than SSP and a set of great functions for your organization regarding business solutions. The following information will help you to define functionality in order to put it into a planning worksheet, which I will share later. However, I recommend that you should learn it cautiously because I only give you a brief summary as follows
SharePoint Foundation 2010, which is a free version, only has 2 available Service Applications: Usage and Health Data Collection and Business Connectivity Service.
Before deploying Service Applications, you need to understand components of the Service Applications. There are three components that you should document when planning your Service Application architecture.
Now, it’s time for me to give you the medicine. Is Service Application better than SSP? I would like to compare Service Application with SSP but let me do it later. You will be amazed at my comparison. First, you can deploy granular services, delivering only the services that are requested for each Web application. For example, you have 2 department Web applications that are using the same Default group. However, the Finance department needs to secure their information, such as revenue, exchange rate, financial analysis and so on, you definitively can do it by creating a new instance Service Application and then associating it with the Finance department.
Administrators will be happy if their infrastructure or something is centralized in order to manage it effectively. SharePoint 2010 provides effective local management by delegating administration of Service Applications via Central Administration. You can delegate a specific user as the Service Application administrator in the security scenario that the following image demonstrates. I’m just permitted to access Application Management namely Managed Metadata Service.
To improve performance, you can deploy multiple instances of a service application for the same Web Application. For example, your manager wants to improve Excel rendering in a Web browser, you can create a new instance of Excel Service in the same Web application that is connected to the existing Excel Service connection.
SharePoint 2010 allows you to share Service Applications across farms. Using this new functionality is to reduce your resource and centralize your solution in one place. For example, suppose your organization belongs to an Enterprise group, thus you have 4 farms for different goals, such as publishing the content solution, Collaboration or Department. If you create a new instance of Service Application for each farm, you will find it difficult to manage Service applications effectively. As I mentioned, you can centralize cross-farm capable Service application.
Not all Service Applications can be shared across farms. When do you share Service applications across farms? Please consider the following reasons:
The last thing you should know is the extensibility that you can utilize in order to deploy third-party Service Applications in your SharePoint environment, such as Microsoft Project Server 2010.
It still remains new functionality that is Multi-Tenancy. You can refer to these great resources:
Summing up
Service Applications is like a buffet where you can select what you want to eat. SSP is monolithic while Service Application is clay. It’s hard to model monolithic
things but you can shape clay depending size:12px;">Rational Guide to Multi Tenancy with SharePoint 2010
Personally, I think that releasing Service Application is one of Microsoft’s strategy because you, who are SharePoint 2007 Administrator, will be interested in the functionality
of Service Applications that not only resolve your issues but also leverage businesses for your organization. Now, I know that you will consider it carefully and then upgrade to SharePoint 2010. In the next part, we will discuss how to plan Service Application architecture as well as design in order to meet business requirement.