Sharepoint 2013 : Service Application Fundamentals (part 1) - The Connection Structure -Service Application Groups

The preceding section is just a simplified overview of how services work in SharePoint, of course. Before you can effectively put service applications to work, it is important to understand the connections and relationships of services to web applications. The following sections explore the glue that binds service applications. While conceptually it is easy to see that service applications provide capabilities to the web applications, in reality there is a lot going on to make those connections work. To effectively troubleshoot and support the SharePoint farm going forward, you need to learn those details.

1. The Connection Structure

Service applications are not offered directly to web applications, as you might have assumed from the preceding section. Instead, a series of connections and associations determine how services are offered, as shown in Figure 1.

FIGURE 1

SharePoint web applications are associated with service application groups. These groups are composed of one or more service application connections. Service application connections act as a bridge, admitting the service applications into the service application groups. A service application consumes one or more service application services, some of which may have databases for storage. If this sounds confusing, the following sections should help clarify how these components are integrated.

Service Application Groups

You already know what a web application is at this point. The service application group specifies how services are associated with a web application. When you created the web application, you used SharePoint’s default service application group (see Figure 2). Notice that all the check boxes are grayed out when the default group of connections is chosen. You cannot edit the default group in this dialog as you create a web application.

FIGURE 2

The default group is automatically provisioned for you. If you used the initial Farm Configuration Wizard, then all the service applications are part of this group. When you manually create a service application, you can choose to include it in the default group or not by using the check box shown in Figure 3.

FIGURE 3

This group enables you to associate a web application with a collection of service applications. If the default group doesn’t meet your needs, you can you can use the [custom] option to specify which service applications you want to use for the web application. Keep in mind that although [custom] appears in the group drop-down menu, you cannot reuse this “group.” When you create a web application and specify [custom], you choose the service applications available to that web application. If you then create a second web application and select [custom], you will not see the service applications you chose for the first web application selected. Each usage of [custom] is a unique instance, and not reusable.

Proxy groups or application proxy groups are other terms you may hear used for service application groups. This is how they are referred to in the SharePoint 2013 Management Shell and in the object model (OM).