Microsoft Sharepoint Products and Technologies Resource Kit eBook

200 Part III: Planning and Deployment
account for these SharePoint Portal Server services and the SQL Server services.
However, you can choose to use a different account for SharePoint Portal Server
services and SQL Server services if you have different groups administering SQL
Server and SharePoint Portal Server farms. Be sure to make that account a member
of the local administrator group of each computer running SharePoint Portal
Server. You must also add this domain account to the SharePoint Portal Server
administrators group.
Planning User Accounts
You need two user accounts:
■ Configuration database administration account
■ Default content access account
The following topics describe these accounts.
Configuration Database Administration Account
The configuration database administration account is the user name and password
that SharePoint Portal Server uses when connecting to the configuration database or
when propagating full-text indexes from index management servers to search servers.
This account must have administrator rights on both the index management
server and the search server.
Default Content Access Account
This account is used as the default account for crawling content sources defined for
a content index. For internal content, such as portal sites and site directories, you
can use specific access accounts through exclude and include rules. This account
should be a member of the SharePoint Portal Server administrators group so that it
can access and crawl all content sources and their properties. In this case, the
account uses Windows Integrated Authentication for accessing content by default. If
this method of authentication fails, it uses Basic Authentication unless you have
explicitly disabled Basic Authentication access.
Planning the Corporate Portal Site
The corporate portal site is the entry point from which all employees can get the latest
corporate-wide information. Usually the corporate portal site is a parent portal
site providing shared services, but this is not always the case. Sometimes a Share-
Point Portal Server deployment includes only one portal site, which is the corporate
portal site. In other cases, there are multiple portal sites, but they don’t share services
with the corporate portal site. However, the majority of SharePoint Portal
Server deployments will have a corporate portal site providing shared servers to the