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Office SharePoint Server 2007: Applications and Services

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Conceptually similar to shared services in Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003, the Shared Services component is completely restructured and redesigned in the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 using a new services provider model.

A Shared Services Provider (SSP) provides a common set of services and service data to a logical grouping of Web applications and their associated sites. This topic describes how SSPs work in Office SharePoint Server 2007 and includes recommendations on planning for SSPs.

The following shared services are provided by each SSP:

  • Personalization services that provide user profiles based on data imported from directory services, My Sites with personal information that can be shared by all users in the SSP and managed by privacy policies, and content targeting by audience, Office client application, or personalization site links.

  • Business Data Catalog that provides a single unified schema for data stored in line-of-business (LOB) applications.

  • Excel Services that provides shared worksheets and a way to analyze business data from data connection libraries by using reports in dashboard pages.

  • Enterprise Search in Office SharePoint Server that crawls all sites on Web applications by using the SSP to create a single index of all content, data, and metadata.

  • Portal usage reporting that enables SSP administrators to view aggregated information about site usage across the entire site hierarchy. SSP administrators can also enable usage reporting for administrators of individual sites and site collections.

  • Notification service for generating alerts.

When a server farm is installed, you create the default SSP as one of the first post-setup tasks. Each SSP contains all of the available (installed) shared services.

  • You associate SSPs with specific SharePoint Web applications.

  • A SharePoint Web application can be associated with only one SSP.

  • All site collections and sites within a SharePoint Web application consume services from the same SSP.

  • Shared services cannot be enabled or disabled at the site collection or site level. All services that are available from the SSP are available to all sites within the Web application.

A server farm can host one or more SSPs. Additionally a server farm can consume services provided by an SSP on a different server farm. You can deploy shared services in two ways:

  • In intra-farm shared services, the server farm uses the services of an SSP hosted on the server farm.

  • In inter-farm shared services, the server farm uses the services of an SSP on a different server farm. A server farm that is consuming services from a different farm might not contain any SSPs. The one limitation to this configuration is that Excel Services is not available outside the farm that hosts this service. If Excel Services is required by a farm, that farm must host shared services locally.

In most single-farm environments, one SSP provides services for an entire organization. Multiple SSPs are used only in deployments that have a proven need for securely isolated content.