SSP Shared Services Providers (SSPs)

Rule:
Each SSP contains all of the available (installed) shared services.
You associate SSPs with specific Office SharePoint Server Web applications.
A Web application can only be associated with one SSP.
All site collections and sites within a Web application consume services from the same SSP.
Important points at SSP:
Shared services Description:
1. Personalization services
Provides user profiles based on data imported from directory services; My Sites with personal information that can be shared by all users in the SSP and managed by privacy policies; and content targeting by audience, Office client application, or personalization site links.
2. Business Data Catalog
Provides a single, unified schema for data stored in line-of-business applications.
3. Excel Services
Provides shared worksheets and a way to analyze business data from data-connection libraries by using reports in dashboard pages.
4. Office SharePoint Server Search
Crawls all sites of Web applications using the SSP to create a single index of all content, data, and metadata.
5. Portal and search usage reporting
Enables shared services administrators to view aggregated information about site usage across the entire site hierarchy. Shared services administrators can also enable usage reporting for administrators of individual sites and site collections.
6. Project Server
This service is available if Microsoft Office Project Server 2007 is installed on the farm. Hosts one or more Project Web Access instances, exposing scheduling functionality and other middle-tier calculations on Office Project data, and exposes Web services for interacting with Office Project data. A Project Web Access instance is created to expose Office Project Server functionality to end users in a Web application that consumes this shared service.