Wednesday, January 7, 2015

SharePoint 2013 Service Applications - Overview

SharePoint 2013 is very much rich for service applications. Below is the list of all service applications available in SharePoint 2013 with its short description.
Access Service
Access Services in SharePoint Server 2013 allows to host Access databases in SharePoint within the context of an Access app. This app is new in   SharePoint Server 2013 and it can build using Access 2013 desktop client.  The data available can be edited, viewed and new items can created using this app. 

Access Service 2010
The access database which is created previously in SharePoint 2010 can be modified or published using access service 2010 in SharePoint 2013.
It’s important to provide name of the existing access database while creating this service in SharePoint 2013. Start access database service 2010 from CA manage services on server

App Management Service
The App Management Service is new service in SharePoint 2013. Its stores and provides information related to the SP App licenses and permissions. All apps downloaded from SP app market place licenses are stored in this service.
The App Management Service is accessed each time app is requested or used in SharePoint to verify validity of the request

Business Data Connectivity Service
Business data connectivity service was available in SharePoint 2010 and it’s continued in SharePoint 2013. This service is used to communicate with external databases to bring external data in to SharePoint.

Excel Services Application
Excel Services in SharePoint Server 2013 is a shared service that you can use to publish Excel 2013 workbooks on SharePoint Server. The published workbooks can be managed and secured according to your organizational needs and shared among SharePoint Server 2013 users, who can render the workbooks in a browser. Excel Services was introduced in Office SharePoint Server 2007 and is available only in the Enterprise edition of SharePoint Server 2013.

Machine Translation Service
The new Machine Translation Service enables you to reach more people with new cloud-based translation services capable of translating not only sites, but also their content. These services have a comprehensive set of APIs, REST, and CSOM support, so content can be pre-translated when needed, or translated on the fly by users—asynchronously, synchronously, or streaming

PerformancePoint Service
PerformancePoint Services is a SharePoint Server 2013 service application. It enables users to create business intelligence (BI) dashboards that provide insight into an organization's performance. You can create custom reports, filters, tabular data sources, and scorecard transforms to extend the native functionality of PerformancePoint Services.

PowerPoint Automation Service
PowerPoint Automation Services is a new service application in SharePoint Server 2013 that provides automatic server-side conversion of PowerPoint Presentations from one format to another, for example, a PowerPoint Presentation in Open XML File Formar .pptx format can be converted into Portable Document Format (.pdf) for archival purposes, distribution to clients who do not have Microsoft PowerPoint installed, or to protect the presentation from editing.

Managed Metadata Service
The managed metadata service application makes it possible to use--what else--managed metadata. The managed metadata service identifies which database to use as your term store. When you create new terms or users add keywords, those are stored in that database.

Search Service
SharePoint Server Search is a service application which we have come to learn about over the past few articles that it is independent of other services and is no longer tied to the Shared Services Provider (SSP) that was introduced in SharePoint 2007.
SharePoint 2010 search architecture is made up of the Crawler, Indexing Engine, Query Engine and the User Interface and Query Object Model.  We now have greater flexibility and expandability with our search design in 2010 and can setup not only multiple Query Servers but can now scale out our Index server and add multiple instances.
This service crawls content for the search index. This service is automatically started on all servers that run search topology components. The service cannot be stopped or started from the Services on Server page. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg502597.aspx

Secure Store Service
The Secure Store Service is an authorization service that runs on an application server. The Secure Store Service provides a database that is used to store credentials. These credentials usually consist of a user identity and password, but can also contain other fields that you define. For example, SharePoint Server 2013 can use the Secure Store database to store and retrieve credentials for access to external data sources. The Secure Store Service provides support for storing multiple sets of credentials for multiple back-end systems.
State Service
The State Service Application is often overlooked by SharePoint administrators. It is a common source of errors in the server application logs when missing from the farm. As the name implies, this service application maintains state for user sessions and many out of the box features.
If you want to know the health and status of your SharePoint farm, you need to get this service application up and running. Unlike the Web Analytics Service Application from SharePoint 2010
User and Health Data Collection Service
Usage and Health Data Collection Service Application collects Data about Usage and Health of your farm. This information is used for Health Monitoring and this is also required for running the Web Analytics Service. If you do not have a Usage and Health Data Collection Service Application or your Usage and Health Data Collection Proxy is stopped, you will not see any data in the Web Analytics Report.

User Profile Service
The user profile service provides out SharePoint farm with all the social networking features plus more. This stores information about users in a central location.  In order to provision My Sites, enable social computing features such as social tagging and newsfeeds, and create and distribute profiles across multiple sites and farms, you must enable the User Profile service application.

Visio Graphics Service
The Visio Graphics Service is a SharePoint Server 2013 service application that allows users to share and view Visio diagrams by using Visio Services. The service application also enables data-connected Visio 2013 diagrams to be refreshed and updated from different data sources.

Word Automation Services
Word Automation Services is a SharePoint Service Application that is used for server-side conversion of documents that are supported by Microsoft Word. A few new features like on demand file conversion and support for converting streams are introduced in Word Automation Service in SharePoint 2013
Work Management Service
One of the brilliant features in SharePoint 2013 personal site is providing the user with a single view of all the tasks assigned to him in all the SharePoint sites (projects, teams…etc.). The Work Management service application is responsible for collecting this information and not only from SharePoint sites, the Work Management service application can aggregate the tasks from Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Project server and a custom provider model can be integrated.
Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Subscription Settings Service
This service was primarily used for multi-tenency support in SharePoint 2010. In SharePoint 2013, it is also necessary for apps.  http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/fp161236.aspx#ConfigureAppServices
Request Management
Request Manager is functionality in SharePoint Server 2013 that enables administrators to manage incoming requests and determine how SharePoint Server 2013 routes these requests. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj712708.aspx

Search Host Controller Service
This service manages the search topology components. The service is automatically started on all servers that run search topology components. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg502597.aspx

Search Query and Site Settings Service
This service load balances queries within the search topology. It also detects farm-level changes to the search service and puts these in the Search Admin database. The service is automatically started on all servers that run the query processing component. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg502597.aspx

Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Web Application
This is the core service for running your sites. It configures IIS to host the sites providing the SharePoint to end users.

Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Workflow Timer Service
This service supplements the main Timer service with configuration settings for timed workflow events.

Lotus Notes Connector
Lotus Notes Connector provides connectivity for search to crawl Lotus Notes content within a Domino database. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj591606.aspx

Claims to Windows Token Service
The Claims to Windows Token Service (c2WTS) is a feature of Windows Identity Foundation (WIF). The c2WTS extracts user principal name (UPN) claims from non-Windows security tokens, such as SAML and X.509 tokens, and generates impersonation-level Windows security tokens. This allows a relying party application to impersonate the user. This might be needed to access back-end resources, such as Microsoft SQL Servers, that are external to the computer running the relying party application. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee539091.aspx

Distributed Cache
The Distributed Cache service provides caching features in SharePoint Server 2013. The microblog features and feeds rely on the Distributed Cache to store data for very fast retrieval across all entities. The Distributed Cache service is built on Windows Server AppFabric, which implements the AppFabric Caching service. Windows Server AppFabric installs with the prerequisites for SharePoint Server 2013. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj219700.aspx#cache http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj219613.aspx

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