Chapter 1: The Framework
In This Chapter
Examining the roles of the servers in a SharePoint farm
Reviewing the fundamental components of a SharePoint farm
Introducing the new service application architecture
SharePoint 2010 builds on the success of its predecessor by introducing a suite of new service offerings and architectural improvements. For example, SharePoint 2010 provides Visio Services so you can store your Visio diagrams in SharePoint and view those diagrams directly in your browser — without having to install Visio client software on your computer. (Let’s hear it for progress!)
SharePoint 2007 introduced Excel Services so users could collaborate on Excel data directly through the SharePoint browser interface. SharePoint 2010 beefs up Excel Services with improvements in performance and functionality. For example, in SharePoint 2007, if you made a change to the data that affected only two out of five Web Parts on your Web page, the entire page was refreshed — and you had to wait for all the Web Parts to reload before you could see the updates. (Yawn.) Excel Services in SharePoint 2010 takes advantage of AJAX (asynchronous JavaScript and XML) technology so you can refresh specific elements of the page, instead of having to refresh the entire page.
At the heart of the new SharePoint service offerings is a new service-application architecture that replaces the Shared Services Provider (SSP) model used in SharePoint 2007. Its an open architecture, embedded in the underlying ...
