SharePoint 2013 Service Applications

What’s the same?

Architecture

Over all this is the same architecture as SharePoint 2010:

• Proxy Group (Groups of Service Applications consumed by a Web Application)
• Service Application Proxy (Proxy between the Group and the Application)
• Service Application (Search, User Profile, etc)
• Service Application Instance (may be multiple instances of certain service applications)
• Database (if needed)

This architecture is intended for multitenant (think cloud hosted) farms.  It allows you to have a central set of service applications and share them, as required, to all the site collections within the farm and even to site collections in different SharePoint farms.  The inter-farm sharing is a very interesting concept for the larger enterprise clients, along with companies hosting SharePoint.  When dealing with a large group of users these service applications can become very resource intensive.  One way to plan for this is to have a farm that is dedicated to the services.  This allows you to have smaller farm(s) that are only required the resources needed to render the SharePoint sites, but still have a common set of search results or user profiles for example.

Management

You have the same two choices: either through the Central Admin GUI or through PowerShell.  Although if you really consider yourself a SharePoint administrator, then your only option is through PowerShell.  All jokes aside, avoid setting up Service Applications through the GUI.  The SharePoint GUI makes lots of bad decisions when creating your service applications, for example: using GUIDs when creating the databases, using the server name when creating web applications for the service applications.

What’s Changed

Federation

This is what allows you to share service applications across farms both locally and remotely.  Although this hasn't really changed in SharePoint 2013, the service applications that can shared across farms has.  Here is a list of the service applications that can shared across farms:

• BCS 
• Managed Metadata 
• Search 
• Secure Store 
• Machine Translation Services 
• User Profile

In addition the remote farm no longer requires permissions to the parent database.

New Service Applications

Here is a list of the new Service Applications for SharePoint 2013

• Access Services: Create, deploy and manage collaborative web-based Access applications. This can also be used when developing SharePoint Apps 
• App Management Service: For the Market Place 
• Machine Translation Services: Cloud based translation service for documents, pages and sites. Has been built to be extendable, has the ability to use third party translators 
• Work Management Services: Puts all your outstanding tasks in My Tasks. Has two way sync with Project Server, Exchange and plugins for other systems (MS is very vague on what that means). Even has the ability to remind you of tasks on your mobile device. You’ll never be safe again

Improved Service Applications

These service applications have gotten even better in SharePoint 2013

• Managed Metadata: Improved Managed Metadata navigation 
• Search Service: FAST and Web Analytics have been rolled into search 
• Subscription Settings Service: Now handles app management 
• User Profile Service: Added back in a 2007 style sync (strictly read only and faster), ability to import additional properties from BCS

Removed Service Applications

These service applications did not make the cut in SharePoint 2013

  

• Web Analytics: Rolled into Search Service 
• Office Web Apps: Now its own product, but available for externally facing (internet) SharePoint sites