HowTo - SharePoint - Get a list of SSPs in code

Ever wanted to get a list of all the Shared Services Provider (SSP) in a SharePoint Farm, for example to retrieve all the search service instances in a Farm?


To accomplish this, we need to walk through all the web application and determine if the web application is a SSP web application. We can do this by validating if the web application contains a property called “Microsoft.Office.Server.SharedResourceProvider”. The property “” contains a property “AdministrationSiteId”, which is the id of the SSP Administrator Site.

Remark: in most situation we will get two web applications, for a single SSP, with the “Microsoft.Office.Server.SharedResourceProvider” property. This because in most situation we have a Search web application and a MySite web application for a SSP.

The code will look like this:

 private StringCollection GetAdminSiteIDs(SPFarm farm)
{
   StringCollection colAdminSites=new StringCollection();
   SPWebService webService = farm.Services.GetValue();
   foreach (SPWebApplication webApp in webService.WebApplications)
   {
      //Check if the web app contains a property Microsoft.Office.Server.SharedResourceProvider,
      //which indicates it's a SharedResourceProvider.
      if (webApp.Properties.ContainsKey("Microsoft.Office.Server.SharedResourceProvider"))
         {
            object ssp = webApp.Properties["Microsoft.Office.Server.SharedResourceProvider"];
            
            //Get the guid of the Administration Site
            Guid sspGuid = (Guid)ssp.GetType().GetProperty("AdministrationSiteId").GetValue(ssp, null);

            //Check if the site is already processed, because for each SSP, we get two SharedResourceProvider
            //one Search and one MySite.
            if (!colAdminSites.Contains(sspGuid.ToString()))
            { 
               colAdminSites.Add(sspGuid.ToString());
            }
         }
   }
   return colAdminSites;
}