Understand Service Applications
Service applications in SharePoint 2010 are a set of independent processes that allow for both flexibility and scalability in farm architecture. Sometimes referred to as shared services, each application provides specific functionality—such as data connectivity or centralized metadata—to the SharePoint farm. Administrators can create one instance of a service and share it across the entire farm or create multiple instances to partition information to different web applications in the farm.
Service applications take the place of the Shared Service Provider that was found in the SharePoint 2007 architectural model, extending the concept of supporting services by providing administrators with more granular configuration options.
Understanding the Service Application Framework
Service applications are designed to let administrators choose how and where to host the functionality provided by SharePoint. Later in this chapter we’ll go through configuring each of the service applications in detail. For now it is important to understand the relationship among service applications, service proxies, and services running on the server. Table 4.1 lists each of the service applications available in the different versions of SharePoint 2010.
Table 4.1: SharePoint 2010 service applications
| Product Version | Service applications | Purpose |
| SharePoint Foundation 2010 | Application Discovery and Load Balancer | Load balancing of service applications |
| Business Data Connectivity Service | Data retrieval and updating service for line-of-business databases and web services | |
| Security Token Service | Handles requests for Claims-Based Authentication | |
| Usage and Health Data Collection | Gathers and stores usage and health data in the logging database | |
| Web Analytics Service | Collects and reports on user page requests and search queries | |
| SharePoint Server 2010 Standard Edition | Managed Metadata Service | Supports syndicated content type hubs and managed term sets |
| Search Service | Provides indexing and searching functionality | |
| Secure Store Service | Provides an encrypted credential store | |
| State Service | Stores data that needs to be accessed between pages | |
| User Profile Service | Provides My Sites, User Profiles, and Audiences | |
| SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise Edition | Access Services | Executes and renders Access database applications as websites |
| Excel Services | Executes and renders Excel workbooks as web pages | |
| PerformancePoint Service | Generates business intelligence dashboards from multidimensional data | |
| Visio Graphics Service | Executes and renders Visio files as web pages | |
| Word Automation Service | Server-side programmatic manipulation of Word files | |
| Office Web Applications | PowerPoint Service Application | Online viewing and editing of PowerPoint files |
| PowerPoint Broadcast feature, which delivers a PowerPoint presentation in a multicast mode | ||
| Word Viewing Service | Online viewing and editing of Word documents |
Service applications can provide their services to one or more web applications (for more information on web applications, see Chapter 2, “Creating and Managing Web Applications”) in the farm via a service application proxy, which acts as a communication link between the service application and the web applications that it supports. This allows for great flexibility in the application architecture, with one service application providing services to multiple web applications and one web application consuming services from multiple service applications.
Understanding Service Instances
Service applications are connected to service instances, which run on specific SharePoint servers. A service instance is the process that executes on one or more SharePoint servers to deliver the functionality of the service application to the farm. A service application requires at least one instance of the service be running on one of the servers. But in many cases the same service application can run on multiple SharePoint servers, providing both scalability and fault tolerance to the farm. Service applications and service instances operate at different levels in the SharePoint application architecture; service applications are objects defined within the SharePoint configuration database and represent logical sets of configuration settings. Service instances are physical programs that run on servers in the farm and host the service application objects for execution.
Service instances are managed separately from service applications. Whereas service applications are created centrally and apply across servers in the farm, service instances are started and stopped on specific servers in the farm. You can find full details on starting and stopping services in Chapter 5.