One of the big structural changes in SharePoint 2010 are Service Applications, the successor to the Shared Service Provider model in SP2007. Now, service applications are part of SharePoint Foundation 2010 (successor to Windows SharePoint Services). And, there is a many-to-many relationship between service apps and web apps. That means that a web app can consume one or more service apps, and a service app can be consumed by one or more web apps. The easiest way to understand this would be some examples:
- Managed Metadata service app, which manages taxonomy and content types across sites, collections, apps, and farms. You might have an enterprise term store with the enterprise taxonomy, managed by IT. Another term store may contain taxonomy for Finance, and perhaps a select group of users or managers in Finance manage that term store. The finance team site can consume both the enterprise and the finance term stores.
- Search. You might have an intranet search service with search scopes that include Exchange public folders and file shares, as well as all of your SharePoint sites; and another search service that indexes a subset of SharePoint sites. Your extranet sites for partners may consume the SharePoint-only search service, but your intranet team sites may consume both the extranet and intranet search service apps.
Pretty cool, eh? Can you see how interesting this might get?
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About danholme
A graduate of Yale University and Thunderbird, Dan has spent over a decade as a consultant and trainer, delivering solutions to tens of thousands of IT professionals from the most prestigious organizations and corporations around the world. He has recently supported Microsoft technologies design and implementation at enterprises such as Raytheon, ABN AMRO, Johnson & Johnson, and General Electric. He was also the Windows Technologies Consultant for NBC during the Torino Winter Olympics, and is helping NBC to prepare for the Beijing games in 2008.
Dan’s company, Intelliem, specializes in boosting the productivity of IT professionals and end users by creating advanced, customized solutions that integrate clients’ specific design and configuration into productivity-focused training and knowledge management services.
Dan is also a contributing editor for Windows IT Pro magazine, a Microsoft MVP (Windows Server & Directory Services) and is currently penning his third book, to be released later this year by Microsoft Press.