Chapter 18: Administrating Shared Services Providers

This chapter covers the configuration and management of the Shared Services Provider (SSP). First, you'll learn about management of a single SSP, and then you'll learn about creating additional SSPs and consider the reasons for using additional SSPs and implementations in your enterprise.

Introduction to the Shared Services Provider

An SSP is designed to provide a group of services that can be consumed or used by the associated Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 sites created in the same farm. These services are centrally managed and highly configurable so that administrators can choose which component of each service they want to provide to all associated sites. If your design model requires providing different configurations of the same component to separate groups of users, additional SSPs can be created in the same farm to offer those services. Every time a new Web application is created in the farm, it can be associated with one of the SSPs. It will then consume the services offered, such as Audiences, Search, or a Profile database.

Planning 

For most companies, a single SSP should be sufficient, and a second SSP should be created only if the design and planning of the SharePoint implementation such as My Sites, Audiences, Profiles, and Search has been put into place first.

For larger companies with more than one farm, shared services can also be provided and consumed between farms. This functionality is provided by Inter-Farm Shared Services (IFSS) and enables companies to create aggregated information provided by the SSP component across an enterprise. This arrangement is similar in concept to how SharePoint Portal Server 2003 implemented shared services between farms.

An SSP also has its own databases that are used for storing the data of the services that it provides. The databases that are created by default for an SSP are as follows:

• A search database

• A service-specific database that holds information for the provided services. Some of the core data that is held by the SSP service-specific data includes the following:

  q	User information imported from Active Directory or another directory
  q	Audience information
  q	Security information for access rights to the SSP
  q	Business Data Catalog (BDC) data
  q	Search Query data

The SSP itself requires a Web application and application pool that are hosted by Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS). This supplies the resources and stability required for the services provided.

Note 

Dedicating a Web application and application pool for each SSP provides stability and resilience for the services offered by that SSP. You can also create IIS Web Gardens by adding IIS worker processes to the application pool for further reliability. Be aware, however, that doing this will require additional memory resources, so be sure you have enough resources to support your isolation and stability needs.