Microsoft Sharepoint Products and Technologies Resource Kit eBook

122 Part II: SharePoint Products and Technologies Architecture
Individual authentication is used when users know and manage their own credentials
for the enterprise application. In this case, the enterprise-application definitions
map the user’s SharePoint Portal Server credentials to individual credentials
needed by the enterprise application that are stored in the credential database. If a
user’s credentials are not yet in the Single Sign-On credential database, the Web Part
redirects the user to the Single Sign-On logon form used to enter his credentials.
Once the credentials are stored in the credentials database, the mapping should
happen automatically so that user intervention is no longer needed.
Shared Services
In SharePoint Portal Server, by default, each portal site is configured as a separate
entity from other portal sites. As a separate entity, a portal site individually supports
and provides needed resources for all services. If the portal sites within a server farm
belong to the same organization and support the same set of users, the use of
shared services can allow the portal sites to consolidate and save resources.
Shared services centralizes the work required to provide services to one portal
site by creating a parent/child relationship between the portal sites. When shared
services is implemented, the portal site that provides the services becomes the parent
while all other portal sites become children. Because the parent portal site provides
services, the child portal sites are left with only site information—such as
pages, areas, and lists—to support. The following lists how services change when
shared service is implemented:
■ Search and index. With shared services, crawling and index creation are
consolidated in the parent portal site. Search requests from child portal sites
are processed by the parent portal site.
■ Alerts. With shared services, alerts are managed and tracked in a single alert
store in the parent portal site.
■ Personal sites. With shared services, personal sites are created only in the
parent portal site and can be viewed and accessed from the child portal sites.
The My Site portal page is also located in the parent portal site.
■ User profiles. With shared services, a single user profile database is configured
in the parent portal site and is accessed by the child portal sites.
■ Audiences. With shared services, audiences are compiled and stored only in
the parent portal site.
■ Single Sign-On service. With shared services, only one Single Sign-On credentials
database is created. This database is located and administered only in
the parent portal site.