This week I have the privilege of attending Microsoft’s SharePoint 2010 Ignite Virtual training course.  SharePoint 2010 Ignite is deep technical training for SharePoint 2007 professionals who are looking to upgrade their skills to the new version of SharePoint.  I am excited to learn more about the new features and functionalities of SharePoint Server 2010.

The first day included an overview of the following:

• New User Interface (the Ribbon)
• Architectural Changes
• Introduction to the new Service Application model (no more Shared Service Provider - SSP)
• Business Continuity Management 

I was particularly interested in the new Service Applications model and Multi-tenancy.  In MOSS 2007, if you wanted to consume a shared service such as Search, well then it was turned on for the entire farm and managed in the SSP.

In SharePoint 2010, SSP’s go away and services are now “a la carte” which enables far more flexibility in planning farms and services.  Services can be individually consumed from any Web Application.  Some of the services include:  Access Services, Business Connectivity Services, Excel Services, Managed Metadata Service, People, Search, Usage and Health Data Services, Visio Services, and Web Analytics Services.  Now, each individual Web Application can consume the services that are needed for the business solution.

In Multi-tenancy, the goal is to manage SharePoint as a live running service for one or more divisions, organizations, or companies and have a way to easily administrate charge backs to these tenants.  SharePoint 2010 has the ability to uniquely separate each customer on a shared environment and allows for data, usage, and administrative isolation by way of subscription ID.  The subscription ID is used to map features and services to tenants.  Site Subscriptions group site collections based on tenants.  Multi-tenancy of services makes it possible to share services resources across customers while partitioning data based on site subscription. 

Multi-tenancy is a fantastic solution to being able to manage a SharePoint farm’s environment and resources while having the confidence that the data for each customer or tenant is isolated from one another.