About Shared Services

Shared services are portal site services that are shared across server farms. The services are centrally managed from a single portal site for one or more server farms.

You cannot specify individual services to be shared. All of the following services are shared:

• User profiles   A user profile organizes and displays all of the properties known about a person within a portal site. When user profiles are shared, the parent portal site shares the information from the profile database with the child server farm.
• Audiences   An audience is a custom group used to target content to people based on membership in that group.
• Search   The search component consists of one or more services, databases, or related files that provide search functionality in a product. The parent portal site provides search services to the child server farm.
• Alerts   Alerts help users track changes to content that is relevant to their everyday work. Users can choose to be alerted to the following types of items: search queries, areas, files, and folders.
• Single sign-on service   Single sign-on is an authentication process that permits a user to enter one name and password to access multiple applications.
• Personal sites   My Site is a personal SharePoint site created in the portal site that provides personalized and customized information for you and your users. On this site, you will find content targeted to you based on membership in a particular audience. In addition, My Site provides quick access to things you need to do your work. This may include links to documents, people, or Web sites as well as personal alerts you create to track changes to content within the portal site and your organization. From My Site, you can also update your public profile and share collections of links with other portal site users. Personal sites can be hosted by a non-parent portal site or on another server farm.

Note  Document library servers for backward-compatible document libraries (Web Storage System-based) do not participate in shared services. Each server farm must have its own document library server.

Terms Used in Shared Services

The server farm that provides shared services is the parent server farm. The portal site that provides the services is the parent portal site. Only one portal site on a server farm can provide shared services.

The server farm that uses shared services is the child server farm. Each portal site on that server farm is a child portal site. A child portal site is any portal site that uses shared services from a parent portal site.

When you configure a portal site to provide shared services, all other portal sites on the server farm become child portal sites. Any additional portal sites that you create on the server farm are automatically child portal sites.

Each portal site on a server farm can have its own user profiles, audiences, search, alerts, and personal sites. When you configure the server farm to provide shared services, you must decide which portal site you want to be the parent portal site based on that criteria.

Why Use Shared Services?

In a typical organization, there might be multiple deployments of Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003. Each portal site can store user profiles, conduct search and indexing, and provide alerts. It becomes expensive to deploy each portal site with all of the services, because many of the services are common to all portal sites. To consolidate resources, you can factor out the common services of search, indexing, alerts, and user profile management by using shared services provided by a parent portal site. The child portal sites in the organization can then provide content based on division or application without using up resources on the technical details of import and crawl. They will use these services from the parent portal site.

Considerations when Using Shared Services

You should consider the following before providing or using shared services:

• After you configure a server farm to provide shared services, all other portal sites on that server farm become child portal sites.
• The parent server farm and the child server farm must be running the same version of SharePoint Portal Server in the same language.
• The parent server farm and child server farm must belong to the same domain or trusted domain.
• The parent and child server farms both must be on the intranet, on the extranet, or in a perimeter network (also known as DMZ, demilitarized zone, and screened subnet). You cannot have a firewall between the parent server farm and the child server farm.
• Sharing services is at the server farm level. All portal sites on a child server farm will be child portal sites.
• You should back up the server farm before you configure it to provide or use shared services. After you configure the server farm to provide or use shared services, you cannot undo the operation.
• A child portal site can never be changed to a parent portal site.
• When you configure the server farm to use shared services, the services that are no longer required on the child server farm are disabled. Administration pages for managing these services will display an error message stating that the service cannot be managed on this server farm.
• Some services and scheduled tasks in the child server farm need to be turned off before you configure the server farm to use shared services. These services and tasks include the Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server Search service (SharePointPSSearch), search schedules, profile import, and the audience compilation schedule.

Sample Scenario

1. Create a parent portal site on the parent server farm that has the following:
   • User Profiles populated from a directory
   • Audience definitions
   • Content indexes for each portal site using shared services
   • Centralized alert store
   • Single sign-on database
2. Create child portal sites on the child server farm and attach them to the shared services of the parent portal site. Each child portal site contains only site information (areas, lists, etc.) and sources shared data from the parent portal site. The job server, indexing, alerts, and classification are provided by the parent server farm.

Related Topics

Providing Shared Services

Using Shared Services