Skip to main content

Difference between the architectures of SSPs and SharePoint Service Application


SharePoint 2010 has some new features and components, which help to overcome difficulties such as redundancy and service-sharing that we faced while using SharePoint 2007. 


Services in MOSS 2007 were implemented with the help of Shared Service Providers or SSPs. But we cannot use the services of one SSP for another SSP. So each SSP has to have its own set of services and applications, which increases redundant data in the farm. 


For example, different managers in the same organization use a SharePoint site to maintain official data associated with an SSP. This SSP is associated with different services, such as Search service, BDC service, and a user profile service. A project manager in this organization requests an exclusive user profile service to maintain project data security. To provide this, we first need to create a separate SSP for the project manager and then a separate service called user profile service - project name. Next, we need to associate the SSP with the service and configure the user profiles service for the manager. However, when we do this, the project manager will not be able to access the Search service and BDC service. So you need to associate the Search service and the BDC service for this SSP as well. 


If there are numerous similar requests, then it will lead to data redundancy.


SharePoint 2007 architecture


In SharePoint 2010, this redundancy and service-sharing issue is resolved because SSPs are replaced by Shared Service Applications or SSAs. Commonly known as service applications, SSAs allow services to be shared across farms and web applications. 



Suppose that the organization that uses SharePoint 2007 for maintaining department data were to upgrade to SharePoint 2010. SharePoint 2010 would contain a web application, WebApplication1, connected to a User Profile and services such as Search service and BDC service. The project manager's request for an exclusive user profile service would now be implemented differently. 


We would create a web application, WebApplication2, and provide a user profile service application exclusively for this web application. Then, you would be able to associate the web application with all service applications shared across the web application. So the project manager would be able to access the other service applications in addition to using the new service application, which eliminates the scaling issues that exist with SSPs. 


SharePoint 2010 Architecture
Besides these differences in their ability to share services, the architectures of SSP and SSA have many other differences, as listed in the "Differences between the SSA and SSP architectures table"



Differences between the SSA and SSP architectures
Feature
SSP architecture
SSA architecture
Service sharing
Each SSP has its own set of services and applications. You can't share services between two SSPs. So you need to configure new services for every new SSP.
Services are present in the form of service applications that can be shared across web applications in a farm, and some of them can even be shared across farms.
Configuration
Each web application can only be associated with a single SSP, so the same services need to be configured for every SSP. This causes redundancy, duplication of services, and major scaling issues.
You can associate the same web application with multiple SSAs, which provides flexibility in configuration.
Environment
It is easy to manage an isolated SSPs environment, because each SSP has its own set of services and applications.
It is difficult to manage an SSA environment because of shared services.



Besides providing service applications, SSAs provide several other benefits like;


• reduce incompatibilities that may be faced while administering SharePoint 2007, because service applications are part of all products in SharePoint 2010, including SharePoint Foundation 
• allow services to be shared across farms and reduce redundancy, and 
• make configuration flexible, because service applications have a many-to-many relationship with web applications 



Comments

Nate said…
Thank you Manoj, Its an awesome article.
Best Regards
Nataraj
Nate said…
I was going to teach some students about the difference, Do you mind if I use your article?
Regards
Manoj said…
Hi Nate,

Feel free to use the content in this blog, good to know that you've found the article informative.
Unknown said…
Thank YOU for sharing This document..

Anonymous said…
great article on sharepoint architecture. Thanks much Rajeev-

Popular posts from this blog

"Cannot impersonate user for data source" - SSRS reports

We were getting this strange error while viewing our reports in SharePoint that was deployed using BIDS 2005: An error has occurred during report processing. Cannot impersonate user for data source 'datasource' Logon failed I tried many things but nothing worked. I did some research and found many blog posts which suggested me to reapply the password on the datasource file specified in the error message and save it again. That didn't work for me. I saw some check boxes in the data source file that read "Use as Windows Credentials" and "Set Execution Context to this report" and I didn't know what they meant. I unchecked those in my data source and then when the refreshed the page the report started displaying.

Users do not show up in SharePoint People Search or People Picker

I had this issue with people picker in a classic mode web application in SharePoint 2013 and this site is in 2010 mode - users in certain sub-domains would not show up in People Picker. I was aware of stsadm commands to fix this and we ran the stsadm command to hook up people picker with another domain some time back. The latest issue was that people picker was not returning users from the root domain and few sub domains. After researching on the internet I found (contrary to my thoughts) that we could use PowerShell and not just stsadm to map People Picker to domains. It is a good idea to first check what domains are added/mapped to the web application using the following commands: $wa = Get-SPWebApplication -Identity http://mywebapp.com #List the Domains $wa.PeoplePickerSettings.SearchActiveDirectoryDomains This will list the domains currently People Picker is looking up for that web application. I used the following script to map our AD forest to People Picker:

Report Server has encountered a SharePoint error. ( rsSharePointError)

I was receiving this error on the "Report Server Web Service URL" on our SharePoint farm: Report Server has encountered a SharePoint error. ( rsSharePointError) Access to this Web Site has been blocked. Please contact the administrator to resolve this problem. This site URL is configured via Central Administration > Configure Reporting Services Integration > Reporting Services Integration if Reporting Server feature/Add-in is installed on the farm. After doing some research I found out that this page somehow enumerates through entire site collections before it throws this error. As part of troubleshooting step I checked if the domain user configured for reporting service is has sufficient privileges in the farm and also as local admin of the sql box, but this did not solve the issue. We raised this issue with the vendor and they made us update our SQL Server 2005 to latest SP and CU; still we had the error. The reason was nobody was sure if this er