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Having 12 years experience in Microsoft technologies.Since more than 7 years working in SharePoint technologies. Expert in providing consultation for SharePoint projects. Hands on with development and administration.

Friday 17 May 2013

Service Applications In & Out - SP 2013

Service application improvements

From a service application perspective, the SharePoint 2013 architecture remains the same as that for SharePoint 2010. There are, however, new service applications available, service applications that have changed, and some that have been deprecated.

New service applications

SharePoint 2013 contains three new service applications:
Machine Translation
Work Management
App Management
Of these three new service applications, only the Machine Translation service application can be used as a cross-farm service application; that is, it can be configured to be accessible from multiple SharePoint farms within your organization. The other two can only be used within a single farm


The Machine Translation service application

This connects to the Bing cloud-based translation service by which users can employ machine translation on sites, files pages, and term sets located in the MMS. This cloud-based service doesn’t understand context and keeps words in same order. This service can run in partitioned mode if you need to use it in a multitenant environment.

On the management page for the service application you can configure which file types to translate, the maximum file size (binary and text files), the maximum character count for Word documents, as well as other options, including specifying a web proxy server, number of translation processes created on each server, frequency of the throughput, maximum translation attempts, maximum synchronous translation requests, translation quota, and whether extra security checks are performed for Office 97-2003 documents. The Machine Translation service application processes translation requests asynchronously, synchronously (for instant translation), and via ad hoc translation.This service can be used as the primary translation engine not only for files, pages, and streams ofbytes produced by programs, but it can also be used for variation’s content.
  
There are a number of timer jobs for this service:

1. Language Support, which runs weekly and updates the languages available to the Machine Translation service application.

2. Machine Translation service application timer job that by default runs every 15 minutes and initiates the translation of documents that have been submitted to the Machine Translation service application. The frequency of this timer job is configured on the Service Application Management page.

3. Translation Export Job Definition for each web application associated with a Machine Translation service application that exports pages and lists content to XLIFF for human translation or machine translation via the Machine Translation service application.

4. Translation Import Job Definition for each web application associated with a Machine Translation service application that imports translated page and list content from XLIFF to the correct location in a site collection.

5. Remove Job History removes the completed job history. The frequency of this timer job is configured on the Service Application Management page.

Full-trust solutions can be created to perform immediate or batch translations by using the REST API or Client-Side Object Model (CSOM) as well as server APIs. You can find information about writing custom solutions by using the Machine Translation service application at msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj163145(v=office.15).aspx.

Note: The Machine Translation service application offers no user interface; therefore, any activity would need to be recorded by custom code.
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The Work Management service application

The Work Management service application (WMSA) provides functionality to aggregate tasks. With it, users can view and track their to-do’s and tasks from one central location: their My Site. Tasks are aggregated from a number of Microsoft products, including Microsoft Exchange 2013, Microsoft Project Server 2013, and SharePoint 2013.

The tasks are cached in the user’s My Site with a two-way synchronization so that they can either be updated in the user’s My Site or updated in the product where they were originated. Information concerning tasks held in Exchange 2013 is obtained by using the Work Management Synchronize with Exchange timer job, which runs every 5 minutes.

Exchange 2013 provides new and improved Exchange Web Services (EWS) and web service interfaces that can be used to access and manage information stored in Exchange. If you plan to use the Exchange 2013 integration capabilities with SharePoint, you need to install the Exchange Web Services Managed API, which can be downloaded from Microsoft’s download site at www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=35371.

The WMSA is based on Provider model so that other systems can be integrated in the future.The Central Administration website does not provide any management pages for this service application.
Any integration with this service must be done programmatically.

Note The WMSA and the EWS Managed API must be installed if you want to use the social computing My Tasks to aggregate tasks from SharePoint, Exchange, and Project Server. 

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App Management Service
The App Management Service is used to access SharePoint Apps, which is a new application architecture for SharePoint 2013
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Deprecated/changed service applications

The search service application

The search service application (SSA) is another area in which Microsoft has made major investments. SSA has been completely re-engineered from the ground up, built on functionality from SharePoint
Server 2010 enterprise search and FAST Search for SharePoint 2010. Not only is FAST Search no longer a stand-alone product, but indeed, it is a dead one.
SharePoint 2013 enterprise search provides a powerful, scalable, and extendable service. It incorporates `better support for in-context refinements and provides in-line previews. For example, you can find information about a document on the search results page without opening the document.

SharePoint 2013 search uses a single object model for all SharePoint 2013 products. This means that SharePoint Foundation 2013 and the Standard or Enterprise editions of SharePoint Server 2013 all have the same underlying search object model.

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MMS

MMS has become more robust. Tags can now have properties, and you can use these properties for site-based navigation. You can control how users create tags, and you can now “pin” terms to prevent accidental duplication of tags. MMS also includes improvements and additional capabilities in a multilingual environment, without the need to install language packs.

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Office Web Apps

Office Web Apps is no longer a service application. It is now packaged as a separate product and installed on its own set of servers (farm). This way, you can scale, manage, and maintain Office Web Apps as a separate entity without affecting the installation of the SharePoint farm. It is also licensed separate from SharePoint licenses.

Office Web Apps is used by Exchange 2013 and Lync 2013 as well as by SharePoint 2013, URL accessible file servers, and possibly in the future, third-party document stores, such as Oracle Universal Content Management (UCM) and EMCfs Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Documentum products.

This means that even though you might not have SharePoint installed within your organization,you might want to install Office Web Apps so that you can use it with Exchange and Microsoft Lync to render documents. However, there are license implications in this scenario.

There is no licensing required for viewing documents in SharePoint 2013. But, if you want to create or modify documents by using Office Web Apps in SharePoint 2013, licenses will need to be purchased. You can read more about licensing Office Web Apps for editing Office files at technet. microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff431682.aspx#license.

Some improvements you will see if you use Office Web Apps in SharePoint 2013 include the following:

¡¡ You can view documents in full-screen mode or by using Web Parts. However, Microsoft Visio is not part of Office Web Apps, so you should use Visio Services to display Visio files.

¡¡ Not-so friendly URLs are removed.

¡¡ Multi-authoring is now available with PowerPoint and Word in addition to OneNote and Excel.
¡¡ When a user hovers over the item on the search results page in SharePoint, Office Web Apps displays a preview of the itemfs content.

The separation of Office Web Apps from SharePoint 2013 also frees the Office Web Application team to enhance the product independent of SharePoint.
Office Web Apps needs to be installed on either Windows Server 2008 R2 or Server 2012. It does not need access to an SQL Server, because it does not create any databases. Office Web Apps uses a shared XML configuration file called Farm-Settings.xml for the farm, and then each server in the farm has its own Machine_Name.xml file. You cannot install Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, Microsoft Lync, SQL, or any version of the desktop Office programs on the same servers on which Office Web Apps is installed. If other products that are installed on the same servers as Office Web Apps use web services, they cannot use port 80, 443, and 809.

Note: If you are using Office Web Apps with SharePoint 2013, after both farms are installed, you will need to bind the two together by using the Windows PowerShell New-SPWOPIBinding cmdlet on one of the servers in your SharePoint farm.

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Web analytics

This is no longer a separate service application; it is now part of SharePoint’s search engine. Search is a lot smarter in SharePoint 2013 and can be used to analyze individual actions by the end users as well as click through rates of sessions. This information is then used to provide relevance and suggestion information for users. SharePoint 2010 monitored who visited what and where they went. Now,search provides social analytics 
that also provides information on what users are doing. Microsoft has provided an extensible API.

Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Subscription Settings Service

This service provides multitenant functionality, and as you would expect, it gets better in SharePoint 2013. It still tracks subscription IDs and settings for service applications that are deployed in partitioned mode. All service apps in SharePoint 2013 can be partitioned. However, it still can only be deployed by using Windows PowerShell.

Most on-premises customers will probably not need to implement a multitenant environment; however, if you plan to use SharePoint Apps or host-named site collections, you will need to create this service application. SharePoint Apps are deployed in their own website in a special isolated domain such as AWApps.com or apps.adventure-works.com. The Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Subscription Setting Service is used to establish the domain/subdomain that hosts the websites for the SharePoint Apps. Similarly, the subscription service is used to establish the subdomain that hostnamed site collections use

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The User Profile service application

Most IT professionals had difficulties with the User Profile service application (UPSA) in SharePoint Server 2010, and problems after installing cumulative updates are infamous. Improvements include
the following:


■■ Performance has been optimized. For example, indexes have been added to specific user properties to reduce full-table scans and batch import of data if you use the Business Connectivity Services.

■■ Compatibility with Common Directory Service configurations, including Forefront Identity Manager (FIM) and generic Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) providers.

■■ Ability to monitor profile synchronization performance and stability.

■■ The User Profile Replication Engine (UPRE) was a separate download in SharePoint 2010. This is now part of SharePoint Server 2013. Using UPRE, you can replicate user profile information and some social information between multiple farms.
■■ Additional synchronization options (see Figure 1-14). You can use unidirectional Active Directory (AD) synchronization import as in SharePoint 2010, which still make use of FIM, plus SharePoint 2013 now includes the one-way AD Import, which was the only method available in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.

In SharePoint 2013, you do not need AD replication permissions, even if you use FIM. You can filter on Organizational Units (OUs), users, and AD security groups by using LDAP filters for full or incremental imports, and you can switch between AD Direct and FIM.

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Business Connectivity Service
Improvements to the Business Connectivity Service (BCS) in SharePoint 2013 include the following:
■■ An additional connection protocol, Open Data (OData), has been included. This is an industrystandard web protocol that is used to query and update data. OData applies web technologies such as HTTP, Atom Publishing Protocol (AtomPub), and JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) to provide access to information from a variety of applications, services, and stores. For years, SharePoint has been an OData provider, which means a SharePoint list can be consumed by using OData. In SharePoint 2013, you can now connect to an external data source by using OData. By using OAuth 2.0 with OData connections, you can also achieve more fine-grained permissions.
■■ Developers can create event receivers in SharePoint 2013 that are triggered when data in the external system has changed, as long as the external system provides a subscription and notifications interface. The application or user needs to subscribe to the external system for this to work.

■■ Support for SharePoint Apps has been added. Business Data Connectivity (BDC) information can be included within a SharePoint App. The BDC runtime then creates an External Content Type (ECT) that is scoped at the SharePoint App level. This limits use of the ECT to the Share-Point App. In SharePoint 2010, ECTs could only be scoped at the service-application level.

■■ SharePoint 2013 provides an event listener. This makes it possible for SharePoint users and custom code to receive notifications of events that occur in the external system. For example, developers can write custom code for external lists that trigger SharePoint events when data is changed. SharePoint users could then subscribe to alerts on external lists that are based on ECTs that make use of that custom code.

■■ External list performance improvements and the ability to export an external list to an Excel spreadsheet.

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Access

There are now two service applications, as described here:

■■ Access Services 2010 This mimics the Access service application on SharePoint 2010, by which the tables in your Microsoft Access database are stored as SharePoint lists on the site that was built from the Access web database site definition.
■■ Access Services has been completely rebuilt When Access 2013 databases are published to SharePoint 2013, an Access web app site is created and your data is now stored in a full-fledged SQL Server database, which is automatically generated in the SQL Server 2012 installation that was selected by a SharePoint administrator. The databases created will have a name, such as, db_<guid>, where <guid> is an automatically generated number.
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PowerPoint Automation Service

Although it’s technically not a service application, but rather a SharePoint service because you only have to start the service by using the Services On Server page in the Central Administration web site, SharePoint 2013 includes the new PowerPoint Automation Service. Similar to the current Word Automation Service, it takes presentations and converts them into other formats such as HTML and PDF.

That's it.......

1 comment:

  1. Verify that the user account that is performing this procedure is a member of the Farm Administrators group. Houston translation Service

    ReplyDelete