Shared Service and farm Configuration in SharePoint 2007
The Shared Service Provider in SharePoint (MOSS 2007) is a Farm Centralized web application that provides services like
- User Profile: That include synchronization of User Profile from Active Directory, My Site setting
- Search: Search Configuration, Search Setting, Search usage report
- Excel Services setting: Trusted file location to provide excel service, data connection, data provider and User defined assembly
- Audiences: To Create audience based in rules
- Usage Report: Usage reporting on the web applications
- Business data Catalog: Import Data from other data sources
A question pops-up in mind is why a web application which is centralized in farm provides services to the other web application? Can't a web application have an individual setting for the services that can be configured and consumed? Well, if we talk about a farm in SharePoint it is a combination of servers that has been assigned a role and services in the farm. The farm can be extended to have multiple server with the same role for eg: Web Front End, a farm can have multiple Web Front End and each Web Front End can handle the request from the user. Now since Web Front End will have the web application that process the content on the site and if each web application should have a service configuration then there would tend to exceed the thresh hold value in the infrastructure.
Moreover, to reduce the threshold in the infrastructure where there is a multi-server farm environment the SharePoint provides us the best way to use the Shared Service within the Farm which is known as Inter-farm shared services. The Inter-farm shared services a term which refers when the multi-server farm consume the single Shared Service Provider in which the Farm that host the Shared Service web application is termed as parent farm and the other server utilizing the Shared Service is terned as child farm.