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Service Applications : brief discussion
Written by: Margriet Bruggeman, Nikander Bruggeman.
May 1, 2010
Service Applications : brief discussion
SharePoint 2010 introduces the concept of service applications. SharePoint 2010 consists of a whole bunch of services, including Search service, Excel Calculation service, User Profiles service, Business Connectivity Services, Web Analytics, Word services, PowerPoint Broadcast service, PerformancePoint, Visio services, Access services, Managed metadata service, and Sandboxed Code service. Service applications can be either implemented as WCF services or traditional .ASMX web services and they replace the Shared Service Providers (SSP) model. Service applications are placed on SharePoint application servers which provides excellent scaling capabilities. In essence, a service application provides data or computing resources. SharePoint WFE's always communicate through service instances, which are running physical instances of service applications that can run in a dedicated application pool. Possible topology configurations for service applications are so flexible it allows you to create a services farm containing services that are reused by multiple SharePoint farms.
Note. You can even create your own custom service applications, which is a rather complicated task and before you start doing it, know that there is seldom justification for creating your own custom service application.