Objective:
This article will give an overview of Shared Service Provider in MOSS. This will list out few of advantages of SSP and how they fit into MOSS architecture.
MOSS adapts a three tier architecture
Web Server at front
- These are simple web servers
- These are used for load balancing
- These are used for Fault tolerance
Database Server at back
- These are simple Database server.
- These might be clustered.
- These are used to store data of a SharePoint sites.
Application Server or SSP
Shared Service Provider is collection of Application servers. These servers are used to provide Shared services.
SSP is a Share Point site collection to achieve the services listed below.
The various Shared services are,
- Search
- Index
- Audience Compilation
- User Profile Database
- My Sites
- Business Data Catalogue
- Excel Services
Any of the above service can exist on any number of the Application server.
Index Shared Service could exist on only one Application server.
Five Facts on SSP
- SSP is a separate Web Application
- SSP can run either on port 80 or higher ports
- SSP administration interface is a site.
- There must be at least one SSP
- SSP is available with MOSS not with WSS.
Example of SSP
A good example with a SSP we can import all of the profile information from AD once and then our various web applications can consume the data. So maybe we have http://marketing and http://accounting it doesn't make sense for each one to maintain identical profile information, they should share.
Another advantages of SSP
- Manage user profiles
- Manage audiences
- Manage permission
- Manage user analytics
Conclusion:
This article gave a very basic introduction of SSP in MOSS 2007. Thanks for reading.
Happy Coding