Evolution of Service Applications in SharePoint

Ayshwarya Ramakrishnan
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With SharePoint Portal Server 2003, Microsoft introduced the Shared Services Infrastructure, which was essentially a set of services that can be configured at one time and can be shared across various web apps in the farm.

In MOSS 2007, Microsoft improvised on this with the concept of Shared Service Providers, which provided greater flexibility in deployment and configuration. For example, we could create more than one SSP in a farm and configure them differently and every web app could be associated with exactly one SSP. This helped in some ways, like the scenario where 2 web apps in the same farm needed to have different configurations for search.

The search results from one portal could be differentiated from another, if they were associated with separate SSPs in the farm that have different databases and processes.

In SharePoint 2010, this was replaced by "Service Applications" which had major architectural changes from SSPs of MOSS 2007 resulting in truly flexible deployment and granular delegation of control. Service isolation was a result of having separate content databases and configuration. This was seen as a major improvement over SSPs as they brought in more:

Scalability (by being able to configure SAs on separate servers and control the server which provides the SA),
Redundancy (by being able to be configured as load balanced across many servers in the farm),
Independence (by running on different processes, each service application is independent of the other),
Portability (by means of SA proxies)

And thus greater hardware utilization. Web applications established service connections to talk to these Service applications. The following are the list of Service Applications that were included in the SharePoint Server 2010:

Access Services
Application Registry
Business Data Connectivity
Excel
Lotus Notes Connector
Managed Metadata
PerformancePoint
Search
Secure Store
State
Usage and Health
User Profile
Visio Graphics
Web Analytics
Word Automation

Due to the success of the service applications in SharePoint 2010, the general architecture has been retained in SharePoint 2013, although many new functionalities (in terms of the number of service applications and features in existing service applications) have been introduced and a few service applications reformed. The following table lists these changes.

Service App

Features / Changes

1. App Management Service App - New

(available in SharePoint Foundation 2013 and SharePoint Server 2013)

An app for SharePoint is a custom built application that provides a specific functionality to SharePoint end users. Apps for SharePoint can be purchased from the SharePoint Store which is hosted by Microsoft. Developers who develop SharePoint apps submit their apps to Microsoft which are published in the SharePoint store and are available for site owners or end users who can download and install an app to their SharePoint site. This Service app:

Is responsible for storing and providing information concerning SP App licenses and permissions

All licenses for apps downloaded from the Marketplace will be stored in the Apps service application

Accessed each time app is requested or used in SharePoint to verify validity of the request

2. SharePoint Translation Service-

(available only in SharePoint Server 2013 Std & Ent)

Provides built-in machine translation capabilities on the SharePoint platform to translate documents(Microsoft Word), pages and sites into various languages

Cloud-hosted machine translation services

Translations can be synchronous(translated as soon as they are submitted - manual request) or asynchronous(translation request is triggered by a timer job- automated)

Extensible with support for Full trust solutions and SP Apps, REST API, CSOM and APIs for batch and immediate translations

Translation process have been integrated to variations

External/Manual translation providers can also be leveraged by using XLIFF files- the standard used by translation vendors

3. Business Data Connectivity service

(available in Foundation & Server Versions)

OData Support as data source along with those supported in SharePoint 2010

Eventing FrameWork for external notifications ( even for external lists)

Supports SharePoint Apps as BDC models scoped for app level, not to farm level

External list enhancements include Performance improvements, Data Source Filtering, Sorting, Export to Excel

CSOM API

4. User profile service

(available only in SharePoint Server 2013- Std & Ent)

Performance improvement that claims to reduce full import time from up to 2 weeks down to 60 hours for extremely large directories - for example, 200K users and 600K groups aimed at direct AD forest import

Optimizations by means of indexes to eliminate fill table scans, data import from BDC in batches etc

Other features remain the same as in SharePoint 2010

5. Word automation service

(available only in SharePoint Server 2013 - Std & Ent)

Word Automation Services is all about file conversions, such as doc to docx, PDF, updating the Table of Contents, the Table of Authorities, and index fields, recalculating all field types, setting the compatibility mode of the document to the latest version or to previous versions of Word etc.

Changes include on demand file operation requests to Word Automation Services that are processed immediately and have higher priority than traditional asynchronous Timer Job-based requests. It can also notify or update items in SharePoint after completion. These changes overcome the pain points in SP 2010 of waiting until timer job executes for file generation and not knowing when conversion has been completed.

When using on demand file operation requests, files stored outside SharePoint will also be able to leverage Word Automation Services functionalities using the new Streams feature

6. Access Services App Databases

(available only in SharePoint Server Enterprise 2013)

Collaborative web applications on SharePoint & SQL Server

Site as SharePoint App

Database is a single SQL Server database; Tables in Access are tables in SQL. Access tables are automatically converted to SQL Tables. Access is an abstraction layer over SQL Server.

Simplified designers. Developer-level experience is not required. Provides the ability to create data tracking applications easily as business users

Access "15 storage based on SQL 2012 or SQL Azure

Provides more scalable data storage platform and Rapid Application Development (RAD)

Access Services 2013 doesn't expose an API that we can use to develop Access apps in Visual Studio.

Access Services 2010 - was primarily meant to share Access databases in SharePoint. Here in 2013, the database is actually converted to SQL tables and stored in SQL.

Since this service app is now actually an App, it is isolated from the other stuff on our SharePoint Web Apps etc. For E.g., to bring data from this into a web part on our page, is not done directly, but has to be done through BCS.

7. Visio Graphics Services

(available only in SharePoint Server Enterprise 2013)

Visualize diagrams in browser

Support for Microsoft Visio 2013 file format (.vsdx), Microsoft Business Connectivity Services (BCS) data sources

New commenting framework that provides programmatic access to comments. Users can add comments to a Visio Drawing collaboratively on the web via Visio Services in full page rendering mode. Comments are embedded into the actual visio file; available in the client as well.

Data connections to be configured using Visio 2010 Professional, Visio 2010 Premium, or Visio Professional 2013, which can be refreshed by using Visio Services. Supported data sources are: SQL Server 7- 2012, Excel, SharePoint lists in the same farm, BCS, OLE DB, ODBC and custom .Net assemblies.

Data Connectivity Optimized for windows touch devices

We can now create a SharePoint Workflow using Visio. After the business logic is complete, the workflow can be exported to the SharePoint Designer and can be wired up to a SharePoint site

Changes in shapes, themes, shape effects etc.

8. Work management Service Application -

(available only in SharePoint Server 2013 - Std & Ent)

Work management Service applications provides functionality to aggregate tasks into a central location so that users can view and track their work and to-dos

Tasks cached to a person's my site with tasks from Exchange, Project Server and SharePoint

Implementation is based on a provider model, so that additional systems may be integrated into the same architecture in the future

9. Performance Point Service

(available only in SharePoint Server Enterprise 2013)

The architecture and general model has remained the same as in the previous version to enable users to create business intelligence (BI) dashboards, reports, filters, tabular data sources, and scorecards that provide insight into organization (or customer-related ) data

With the new Dashboard Migration feature, users will be able to copy complete dashboards and dependencies to other users, servers, or site collections. This is also supported by Windows PowerShell commands.

An improved UI to allow users to easily view and manage filters, including letting users search for items within filters without having to navigate through the tree.

The new BI Center is cleaner, and easier to use with folders and libraries configured for easy use.

With the new SSAS EffectiveUser feature, the need for Kerberos delegation is eliminated when per-user authentication is used for Analysis Services data sources. By supporting Analysis Services Effective User feature, authorization checks will be based on the user specified by the EffectiveUserName property instead of using the currently authenticated user.

PerformancePoint dashboards can now be viewed and interacted with on iPad devices that use the Safari web browser.

10. Application Discovery and Load Balancer Service Application

(available in Foundation & Server Versions)

In SharePoint 2013, some service applications can be shared across server farms. By publishing a service application, we can optimize resources, avoid redundancy, and provide enterprise-wide services without installing a dedicated enterprise services farm. The service applications that can be shared are:

Business Data Connectivity

Machine Translation

Managed Metadata

User Profile

Secure Store

Additionally, a SharePoint 2010 farm can consume services from a SharePoint 2013 Server farm. A web application can use both local and remote Service Applications from another farm.

11. Excel Service

(available only in SharePoint Server Enterprise 2013)

Has been used since previous versions for Web-based interactive reporting and sharing and as a platform for building business applications

Powerful analytics with the PowerPivot add-in with support for integration with SSAS, SQL Server, OLEDB and ODBC data sources

Field list and field well support added to Excel services for easier PivotChart and PivotTable control

Calculated measures and members supported in web rendering. For creating calculated measures, we must use Excel Client

Enhanced timeline controls for rendering. To add a timeline control, we must use Excel Client

Quick explore to drill up and down to view higher or lower levels of information. To create new views using Quick Explore, we must use Excel Client

Touch and Device Support on iOS, Android and Microsoft platforms

Simple Excel Forms for collecting entries which are stored in Excel

Excel Interactive View creates an Excel table that is based on an HTML table that is hosted on the same webpage. When you place the Excel Interactive View HTML tag above an HTML table on a hosted webpage, the tag reads the data in the HTML table and creates an Excel table in the browser that you can interact with (filter, sort) and create charts.

Besides the built-in functions available in Excel, we can add our own, custom functions using JavaScript UDFs that we can call from inside formulas in Excel Web AppExcel Web App

JSOM API and Excel Services REST API have been significantly updated such as providing data validation, ability to raise events when something changes in an Excel

OData support through REST APIs

One deprecated feature from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2013 is that we can't edit workbooks in the browser that have external data connections in SharePoint 2013

12. PowerPoint Conversion Service Application - (with SharePoint Server 2013 - Std & Ent only)

PowerPoint Automation Services is about file conversions, such as ppt to pptx, PDF, xps, jpg and png aimed at converting for distribution to clients without Microsoft PowerPoint or to prevent the presentation from being edited

API very similar to Word Automation Services

13. Office Web Apps Service App

This is no longer a Service Application. It has been made a separate product

14. Web analytics service App

Web Analytics is no longer a service application - analyses and reporting process are incorporated into the search service application

15. Managed Metadata Service