Shared Service Providers (SSP's) are an important architectural piece of Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server. As the name suggests, the SSP is a set of services that is shared between multiple web applications. This prevents the need of configuring the same services for each portal site that you create as it is only done once.

SPS 2003 used an approach where one portal was deemed as the master to do the work to be shared across portals. Other portals were configured as slaves so that they could use the indexes and MySite provisioning of the master. However, this architecture was not flexible and it was very fragile when it came to backup and restore. The new architecture is much better because an SSP is defined and configured independently of any portal site.

A new SSP can be created by launching the Sharepoint 3.0 Central Administration application and then navigating to the Application Management tab.

There you find a hyperlink called "Create or Configure this farm's shared services". By selecting this link it will open the "Create" page for the SSP's.

Before being able to use portal features in a Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server farm, someone must create and configure the default SSP. The image above shows the page on the Sharepoint 3.0 Central Administration application that is used to create and configure an SSP. All new web applications will automatically be associated with the default SSP when they are initially created.

Note that it is possible to create more than one SSP. That means different portals and team sites can be configured to use different content sources in their searches or different MySite provisioning. However, each Web application (and all the sites on it) must be assigned to the same SSP. For two sites to use different SSP's, they must be created on different Web applications.

Web applications can also be re-associated at any time by selecting the "Change Associations" button on the toolbar.

Once an SSP is created, the SSP web site can open launched by selecting the new hyperlink that is created in the navigation bar on the left.

The SSP admin web site allows you to configure all the sub-systems that make up the SSP. These would include the following:

• Profiles and MySite - this imports information from an external source about all the users and creates a private web site for each individual called "My Site"
• Search and Indexing - this service allows you to index all the information stored in the content database as well as external sources like file servers, web servers, mail servers etc. The users will then use a "Search Centre" to find the information stored in the Catalog.
• Usage Reporting - this service records all activity on the portal sites and what the users are doing. The information is then aggregated and displayed as web based reports.
• Audiences - this service allows you to target certain information published on portal sites to a selected group of people regardless of permissions. This is based on the profile import and rules defined to create the audience.
• Excel Services - this allows a user to publish spreadsheets to Sharepoint and have them run server side. The individual sheets are also rendered as web pages removing the need for the user to have excel installed before interacting with the spreadsheet.
• Business Data Catalog - this feature allows you to connect an external database to Sharepoint and then display that data as lists.

Different SSP's can also be scaled out over various servers. Read the blog "Sharepoint Topology's". This blog is also a more detailed explanation than the one I explained in the blog "Installing MOSS".

In a future blog I will explain each of these sub systems in more detail.

Related Blogs:

Installation Procedure for MOSS

Sharepoint Server Topologies

Joining a WFE server to a Sharepoint Farm

Overview of User Profiles in Sharepoint