Professional SharePoint 2013 Administration

Chapter 4

Understanding Service Applications

WHAT’S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• The history of services in SharePoint
• Service application basics
• Administering service applications
• Multi-tenancy in SharePoint 2013

Beginning with Microsoft SharePoint 2010, services in SharePoint have been provided by service applications. SharePoint 2013 utilizes the same services architecture, though some of the services are new or modified. Service applications seem simple enough on the surface: The installation wizard deploys them for you in most cases, and the services are automatically available within your farm. Harnessing the full power of this architecture takes a little more effort. Consider, for example, Search, which you can make available in your farm simply by clicking through the wizard but can also be offered as a service that can be consumed by other farms.

In order to truly understand how the different parts of SharePoint’s architecture interact, you need to first understand the terminology used, which includes familiar words such as application, service, proxy, and proxy groups. Mastering the terminology is critical to getting the most out of SharePoint, so pay close attention to the figures in this chapter, which help to put the terms and concepts in context.

This chapter provides the fundamental information you need to understand in order to implement this flexible architecture, including the basics of Central Administration as well as the deeper options exposed by PowerShell cmdlets, ...