In the previous post, I introduced the new capabilities and functions of Service Applications in SharePoint 2010. Planning Service application architecture is one of the processes that SharePoint admins need to know in order to optimize Service Application architecture effectively.
Before planning Service application architecture, you should understand the new capabilities of Service Applications as well as how to use
Default and Custom groups.
Why didn’t I mention how to configure each Service application? Because each Service application has its own individual settings that serve your business solution. You should research the setting by learning how to configure particular Service applications
from other resources after reading my topic.
In MOSS 2007 you only have SSP, which was called monolithic stuff, for serving functions for your business solution so you, as a SharePoint administrator, would not consider the concept of
dependencies.
Because of the diversification of Service application box, some Service applications will be dependent on each other. For example, you need to deploy Social networking solutions including People Search for your organization.
ou need to import user information in order to create the best use of People Search. You'll also need Enterprise Search, which you should utilize for your Social networking solution. For a good resource on Service application dependencies, you should read
this post.
Business functions planning worksheet
After learning about Service application dependencies, you can start identifying your business requirements as well as Service applications, which are responsible for business functions. The big challenge you need to understand is that you must translate business functions into Service applications. The simple reason is that business users or customers couldn’t know the capabilities of Service applications, thus they just show requirements. For example, when you learn the business requirements from a customer, they won’t use any technique words because they don’t know them, thus they will think of common functions in corporate and then explain them to you in business language. In order to translate from business languages into Service applications you must learn, fully, the capabilities and functionalities of Service Applications. Writing down business requirements in the following worksheet will help to define Service applications effectively.
This worksheet is an example that you can refer to. As you see, the business user expects a document management system as well as Search system in order to meet their goal. Service functionality in the worksheet is the capability of a particular service application that you should write down in order to configure later. Or business users may specify that they want to use more social computing functions, such as My Sites sites, so you should think of User Profile Service application.
Define a number of instances depending on an isolated requirement
After making the business functions planning worksheet, you can start considering required isolation depending on department policy in your organization. For example, the Finance department needs to use a separate Excel service for their required performance. They also expect the financial analysis to be secured. In this case, you should create new service instance in order to meet finance department’s requirement.
For high-availability perspective, you should document critical services that must be performed. It means you should use multiple instances to ensure increased availability, which is a part of a business continuity plan for your organization. Remember I’m talking about Service application, not the big Business Continuity Management picture. If you want to learn more about that, please refer to this post.
As a business functions planning worksheet, I strongly recommend writing down the required isolation.
In my example, I wrote down following factors:
- Service application: after identifying service applications, you can put them into this worksheet.
- Critical: you need to define critical level including High, Normal and Low. High-level service is what you need to consider for performance and security policy that your organization actually needs,
- The number of instances: this column allows you to know the number of instances for each Web application.
- Isolation: considering required isolation is to meet performance or security policy in your organization.
Also, you need to list a proxy group that needs to be associated with the Web application by configuring Custom group.
Service application security policy
As I mentioned earlier, this topic is level 100 ITPro thus yo
Personally, I think When it comes to business requirements, the security policy is indispensable. In my next post, I will continue to share my thoughts on security policies for Service applications.