Why SSP in MOSS 2007?

SSP – Shared Services Provider

 MOSS 2007 architecture is very similar to SharePoint 2003 in some ways but different in a few crucial areas.

MOSS 2007 adopts a typical 3-tier model with web servers at the front, application servers in the middle and a database server at the back where all the data and config is stored.

The front-end web servers are simple web servers that can be network load balanced to achieve additional performance and fault tolerance (like Sharepoint 2003). The backend database is a typical SQL 2005 database service and can be clustered as you’d expect.

Then why SSP?

The interesting bit is what goes on in the middle. With MOSS, it is mandatory to have a Shared Service Provider.

What is a Shared Service Provider?

In MOSS 2007 there is this new concept of Shared Services Providers(SSP). The idea being that there are certain services that really make sense to centrally manage and share.

Its Included

1. Search
2. Index
3. Audience compilation
4. User profiles database
5. My Sites
6. Business Data Catalogue
7. Excel Services

Any of the above services can exist on any number of servers within the SSP.

Advatages of SSP

1. Manage User Profiles.
2. Manage Audience
3. Pulling XML for BDC
4. Pulling Excelsheet for Excel Services.
5. Manage Search Service.

Note :

SSP is very important to understand who are they part of MOSS Site Developing Planning Team.

For More Information Please refer

http://msmvps.com/blogs/shane/archive/2007/06/29/what-is-a-shared-service-provider.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/martinkearn/archive/2006/06/06/MOSS-Architecture-_2600_-Shared-Services.aspx