SharePoint is made up of a lot of moving pieces. While it's frequently used as an intranet or document collaboration workspace, it's also a robust application development platform, as mentioned earlier in this chapter. The SharePoint Server experience is fully customizable, and as a framework and platform for development, it is really only limited by the creativity of designers, developers, and administrators.
Many of SharePoint Server's features are made available through service applications. A service application can be thought of as a set of software and configuration components that make features and web applications available to users or other services. The following table lists the core SharePoint Server service applications and their functions:
|
Service application |
Description |
|
Access Services |
Access Services in SharePoint Server provides service applications that enable you to share Access 2013 solutions on the web. Access Services has been deprecated for SharePoint Server 2019, but remains supported. For new design initiatives, Microsoft recommends using Power Apps and Power BI. |
|
Business Data Connectivity Services |
Business Data Connectivity Services allows you to connect to data stored and published in databases, web services, or an OData source for data operations. |
|
Machine Translation Services |
Machine Translation Services provides automated language conversion for publishing site collections. |
|
Managed Metadata |
The Managed Metadata service hosts a centrally shared term store, used for storing metadata (information about information) about the documents and assets in a SharePoint Server farm. |
|
PerformancePoint Services |
PerformancePoint Services is a performance management service that you can use to monitor and analyze your business through the use of dashboards, scorecards, and key performance indicators (KPIs). |
|
PowerPoint Automation Service |
The PowerPoint Automation Service is used by SharePoint Server to perform conversions to PowerPoint documents. |
|
SharePoint Search Service |
The SharePoint Search Service is responsible for making content available to the search interfaces of SharePoint Server, allowing users to discover documents, applications, pages, and other data hosted in SharePoint. |
|
Secure Store |
The Secure Store Service is an authorization service that is used to store credentials. |
|
State Service |
The State Service is a shared service application used to store temporary data related to HTTP requests. |
|
Subscription Settings and App Management Service |
The Subscription Settings and App Management Service supports site subscriptions. |
|
User Profile Service |
The User Profile Service enables the creation and management of user profile data that can be used across SharePoint farms. The User Profile Service can synchronize data from Active Directory and make it available to farm applications. |
|
Visio Services |
SharePoint's Visio Services is used to render Visio diagrams in a web browser, letting users view diagrams without having to have Visio applications or custom viewers installed. |
|
Word Automation Service |
The Word Automation Service is used by SharePoint Server to perform conversions of documents supported by Microsoft Word. |
Some service applications, such as Visio Services, provide a visible benefit to users (such as rendering Visio diagrams directly in a browser). Others, such as the State Service or User Profile Service, are used behind the scenes to make data available to other SharePoint applications.
When connected to Office 365 through on-premises data gateways, Office 365 Power Platform tools such as Power Automate (formerly Microsoft Flow), Power Apps, and Power BI can be used to interact with SharePoint Server data.