Service Applications in sharepoint 2010

TechNet defines Service applications as “a resource that can be shared across sites within a farm or, in some cases, across multiple farms.” Previously resources were shared between sites using the Shared Service Provider (SSP) model. The SSP model worked fairly well with simple deployments but little information was available for complicated distributed deployments which led to a lot of frustration. In addition, one of the big complaints was that the SSP was only available for MOSS versions and was not available for WSS. The Service Applications framework has been built directly into Foundation services which makes it available to all flavors of SharePoint.

A Modular Approach
SharePoint Server 2010 ships with services for all of the main MS Office apps, Search, User Profiles, Managed Meta-Data, Performance Point, and BCS. Not only can you define which applications are configured, but you can manage the associations so that the applications can be exposed to specific SharePoint web applications. Since it is possible to deploy the same service multiple times you can support different configurations and authentication models to support more complex deployments. In addition there are situations where you can use FAST search on some applications and regular Search on others in the same farm. There are an unlimited number of deployment possibilities.

Since the framework is open this provides real opportunities to the ISVs in areas like vertical applications in just about every area. Some of the ECM and BPM vendors have been heavily integrated with SharePoint for years so I think this can only make their offerings that much more powerful.

Another advantage to the modular approach is that it is possible to for both Microsoft and the ISVs to provide new services or service versions outside of the typical long release cycle. I’m hopeful that this will enable some of the currently evolving technologies and features to catch up.