You can group SharePoint 2010 services using the SharePoint 2010 object model and a high level point of view. The following services can be grouped into Windows Services:

• Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Administration
• Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Sandboxed Code Service
• Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Database
• SharePoint Foundation (Help) Search
• Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Timer

Windows Services are services that can be found using Start –> Administrative Tools –> Services. They use the SharePoint object model and can be started using the SharePoint user interface.

Relevant posts

• Installing SharePoint Server 2010 on Windows Server 2008 R2 and SQL Server 2008 R2
• SharePoint Foundation 2010 Service Applications and Services
• SharePoint Server 2010 Service Applications and Services

Resources

• Background: Service Entities in Microsoft SharePoint Foundation

What is it?

Quotes taken from Background: Service Entities in Microsoft SharePoint Foundation.

Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Administration

“In a farm deployment, this special service is used by SharePoint Foundation to perform privileged operations on behalf of the administrator on all front-end Web servers and application servers in the farm.”

Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Sandboxed Code Service

“This service enables administrators to set jobs to run at specified times. It runs on all front-end Web servers and application servers.”

Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Database

“This is really a kind of wrapper around the already installed SQL Server Windows service. It enables the SharePoint Foundation objects to access to the content and configuration databases. In a multiserver SharePoint Foundation deployment, the server that is hosting a database is usually the only one that is running this service.”

Note: I don’t understand the last sentence… usually no SharePoint server hosts a database in a multi tier environment if you have a dedicated database server.

SharePoint Foundation (Help) Search

“This service provides central settings for the management of the user code infrastructure in SharePoint Foundation. It runs on all front-end Web servers.”

Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Timer

“This service enables administrators to set jobs to run at specified times. It runs on all front-end Web servers and application servers.”

Availability

The mentioned configuration services are included in all of the SharePoint 2010 products.

Summary

That’s it with services and service applications offered by a standard SharePoint 2010 installation.

What do you think? Does this kind of posts has some benefit for you and what do you miss?

You can group SharePoint 2010 services using the SharePoint 2010 object model and a high level point of view. The following services can be grouped into Configuration Services:

• Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Incoming E-Mail
• Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Subscription Settings Service
• Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Workflow Timer Service
• Diagnostics (Tracing)
• Outgoing Mail
• Usage

Configuration Services are services holding configuration settings but can’t be grouped into Windows services, Web services or IIS Web services. The last 3 ones can’t be turned on or off but can be configured using Central Administration.

Note: Screenshots below are taken from the server, but should be the same in Foundation.

Relevant posts

• Installing SharePoint Server 2010 on Windows Server 2008 R2 and SQL Server 2008 R2
• SharePoint Foundation 2010 Service Applications and Services
• SharePoint Server 2010 Service Applications and Services

Resources

• Background: Service Entities in Microsoft SharePoint Foundation

What is it?

Quotes taken from Background: Service Entities in Microsoft SharePoint Foundation.

Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Incoming E-Mail

“This service typically runs on only one application server and enables SharePoint Foundation sites to receive e-mail. Doing so can make it possible to let users add items to a list by e-mail.”

Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Subscription Settings Service

“This service supports site subscriptions.” Aha…

Note: Ok this one isn’t necessary for alerts or RSS feeds regarding to Services architecture planning (SharePoint Foundation 2010): “Provides multi-tenant functionality for service applications. Tracks subscription IDs and settings for services that are deployed in partitioned mode. Deployed through Windows PowerShell only.”

If this is interesting for you Spencer Harbar has some articles about that subject: Rational Guide to Multi Tenancy with SharePoint 2010

Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Workflow Timer Service

“This service supplements the main Timer service […] with configuration settings for timed workflow events.”

Diagnostics (Tracing)

“This service supports tracing for the Unified Logging Service (ULS). It runs on all front-end Web servers and application servers.”

Configuration of diagnostic logging allows now the reset the changes to default.

Outgoing Mail

“This service that typically runs on only one application server and it enables SharePoint Foundation to have e-mail functionality such as e-mail alerts when a list has changed.”

Usage

“This service encapsulates settings for usage logging and processing in a SharePoint Foundation deployment.”

Note: These pictures are taken from the server but the described link is also available in foundation.

The files are usually logged to the logs folder in the 14 hive.

Availability

The mentioned configuration services are included in all of the SharePoint 2010 products.

Summary

The Subscription Settings Service was a little bit confusing since I thought it’s about alerts and RSS feeds which seems to be wrong.

You can group SharePoint 2010 services using the SharePoint 2010 object model and a high level point of view. The Application Discovery and Load Balancer, the Claims to Windows Token and the Business Data Connectivity service can be grouped into IIS Web Services.

IIS Web Services are Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) services which are part of service applications. WCF is used for communication between clients and services. So IIS Web Services have a corresponding Service Application where you e.g. can manage the service. (So at the end a service application itself is ‘just’ a service that implements the Service Application Framework.)

Relevant posts

• Installing SharePoint Server 2010 on Windows Server 2008 R2 and SQL Server 2008 R2
• SharePoint Foundation 2010 Service Applications and Services
• SharePoint Server 2010 Service Applications and Services

Resources

• Background: Service Entities in Microsoft SharePoint Foundation
• SharePoint Server 2010 Worker Processes
• Planning for the New Service Application Architecture in SP2010
  This post is just awesome!!

What is it?

Application Discovery and Load Balancer Service

This service is necessary for e.g. adding servers to the farm or for the management or creation / grouping / configuration of service applications. The load balancer allocates requests to service applications.

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.”  (see Claims to Windows Token Service (c2WTS))

Business Data Connectivity Service

Here is a quote of a short but exact description:

“The Business Data Connectivity Service Application now allows for read and write connectivity to external data sources. The Business Data Connectivity service builds upon both the Security Token and Secure Store services to assist in the connection of external data. It also provides inputs to the PerformancePoint, Search, and Visio Graphics Service Applications.” (see Planning for the New Service Application Architecture in SP2010 )

Availability

The three services and service applications are included in all of the SharePoint 2010 products.

Configuration

Application Discovery and Load Balancer Service

This service and service application comes preconfigured and deployed.

Claims to Windows Token Service

This service and service application comes preconfigured and deployed.

As you can see in the picture service applications can be found under the SharePoint Web Services node in IIS manager.

Business Data Connectivity Service

This service application needs a database server and an application pool account.

Summary

Ok now it just gets complicated (at least for me) since I didn’t want to go deep into services. The services architecture is really huge and all the things looking easy in the browser have a lot of other things behind them.

You can group SharePoint 2010 services using the SharePoint 2010 object model and a high level point of view. The Central Administration and the Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Web Application service can be grouped into Web Services.

Web Services make data and web pages available to the browser.

Relevant posts

• Installing SharePoint Server 2010 on Windows Server 2008 R2 and SQL Server 2008 R2
• SharePoint Foundation 2010 Service Applications and Services
• SharePoint Server 2010 Service Applications and Services

Resources

• Background: Service Entities in Microsoft SharePoint Foundation

What is it?

Central Administration

This service is used to publish administrative data and web pages. If you deactivate the central administration service you can’t access the central administration using your browser.

Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Web Application

This service is used to publish data and web pages. If you deactivate this service you can’t access SharePoint web applications you created.

Availability

Both services are included in all of the SharePoint 2010 products.

Summary

These services enable you to provide or restrict access to data and web pages on every server. If you have a three-tier farm you can host the central administration on the application server and deny hosting on the web front-end server.

Office Web Apps 2010 brings Excel, OneNote, PowerPoint and Word to your browser. You can view and edit documents based on these formats (2003-2007 as well as 2010). Office Web Apps can be used with Internet Explorer, FireFox and Safari.

Relevant posts:

• Installing SharePoint Server 2010 on Windows Server 2008 R2 and SQL Server 2008 R2
• SharePoint Foundation 2010 Service Applications and Services
• SharePoint Server 2010 Service Applications and Services

Resources:

• TechNet: Deploy Office Web Apps

What is it?

Office Web Apps 2010 brings Excel, OneNote, PowerPoint and Word to your browser. You can view and edit documents based on these formats (2003-2007 as well as 2010). Office Web Apps can be used with Internet Explorer, FireFox and Safari.

Availability

Office Web Apps 2010 is an optional product and not included in any of the SharePoint 2010 versions. But you can install it with:

Installation

You need to install Office Web Apps on every application and web front-end server in your SharePoint 2010 farm. The installation itself is straightforward…

Configuration

In order to view and edit Excel, PowerPoint and Word documents in the browser you need to create service applications and after that you need to activate a service. OneNote doesn’t require any service or service application.

Service Applications

• Excel Services Application
• PowerPoint Service Application
• Word Viewing Service

Important: If you decide to use a custom service account you need to make sure that it has the rights mentioned in the referenced TechNet article:

”You can choose to create a new application pool to be used with a service application. When creating a new application pool, you can specify the security account used by the application pool to be a predefined Network Service account, or you can specify a managed account. The account must have read\write privileges for the SPContent database and SPConfig database.”

Otherwise you will get the following error in the SharePoint log:

Exception: Cannot open database "WSS_Content_80" requested by the login. The login failed.  Login failed for user 'DOMAIN\spAppPoolWordAcc'.

Services

• Excel Calculation Services
• PowerPoint Service
• Word Viewing Service

At the end activate the corresponding services.

Using Office Web Apps

If you try to edit an old PowerPoint version the edit button is missing in the item drop down. Just click View in Browser and there you will find an edit button helping you to convert the document.

Btw: Excel has no close button… ;)

Uninstall

If you decide to remove Office Web Apps from one server you need to run the SharePoint 2010 Products Configuration Wizard again and re-join the farm!

Summary

That are the basics for Office Web Apps 2010 so far…

SharePoint 2010 comes in a lot of different versions: Foundation, Standard, Enterprise, Internet, with or without Search Server, FAST and Office Web Apps. This article should give you an overview about service applications and services you can deploy with SharePoint Server 2010.

Legend:

• NC – Not configurable

SharePoint Foundation 2010

Service applications and services which are available in SharePoint Foundation 2010 are not listed here. You can find them there:

• SharePoint Foundation 2010 Service Applications and Services

SharePoint Server 2010 Standard

This configuration has the services and service applications of

• SharePoint Foundation 2010 and
• additionally the following services and service applications:
  • Services
    • Application Registry Service
    • Document Conversions Launcher Service
    • Document Conversions Load Balancer Service
    • Lotus Notes Connector
    • Managed Metadata Web Service
    • NC: Search Administration Web Service
    • Search Query and Site Settings Service
    • Secure Store Service
    • SharePoint Server Search
    • User Profile Service
    • User Profile Synchronization Service
    • Web Analytics Data Processing Service
    • Web Analytics Web Service
    • Word Automation Services
  • Service Applications
    • Managed Metadata Service
    • Search Service Application
    • Secure Store Service
    • User Profile Service Application
    • Web Analytics Service Application
    • Word Automation Services

SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise

This configuration has the services and service applications of

• SharePoint Foundation 2010,
• SharePoint Server 2010 Standard and
• additionally the following services and service applications:
  • Services
    • Access Database Service
    • Excel Calculation Services
      (View excel sheets in browser, no edit like in Office Web Apps)
    • PerformancePoint Service
    • Visio Graphics Service
  • Service Applications
    • Access Services
    • Excel Services Application
    • PerformancePoint Service Application
    • Visio Graphics Service

Note: In a comment below Richard says that you need enterprise to install Project Server. Please verify by yourself.

SharePoint Server 2010 with Office Web Apps 2010

This configuration has the services and service applications of

• SharePoint Foundation 2010,
• SharePoint Server 2010 Standard or
  SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise and
• additionally the following services and service applications:
  • Services
    • Excel Calculation Services
    • PowerPoint Service
    • Word Viewing Service
  • Service Applications
    • Excel Services Application
    • PowerPoint Service Application
    • Word Viewing Service

Note: All links above open the same page.

Summary

Looks like there are only a small number of features if you use the enterprise version… but that needs to be clarified somehow.