What is Shared Service Provider ?

An SSP represents a set of services that can be configured a single time and shared across many different MOSS portal sites and WSS sites. Understanding SSPs is critical to being able to take advantage of MOSS features and services.The major services that are handled by the SSP are:

• User Profiles and Audiences
• My Sites
• Search
• Excel Services
• Business Data Catalog (BDC )

Within a MOSS 2007 farm, each Web application is associated with exactly one SSP. One Web application can be associated with one SSP while a different Web application can be associated with a second SSP. The MOSS portal sites and WSS team sites will use the SSP configuration for their parent Web application. As a result, the search results from within one portal site might be very different from the search results within another portal site if they are associated with different SSPs that have been configured to have different content sources.