Microsoft SharePoint: Building Office 2007 Solutions in C# 2005

Chapter 4. SharePoint Shared Services

While a SharePoint farm gives you the ability to create many separate web applications, there are several services that you will not necessarily want to recreate for each new web application. The most obvious example of such a service is the Search Service. In many scenarios, it makes sense to set up the Search Service one time and then share it across several web applications. This is the concept behind the Shared Services Provider (SSP) in SharePoint.

An SSP provides not only a shared Search Service, but also audiences, user profiles, personal sites, Excel Services, and the Business Data Catalog (BDC). Audiences allow you to target content at particular groups of users. The profile service allows you to track ...