Microsoft Sharepoint Products and Technologies Resource Kit eBook

Chapter 14
Shared Services
In this chapter:
Multiple Portal Sites. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 339
Use Intra-Farm Shared Services. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 341
Configuring Shared Services . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 343
Adding Portal Sites . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 345
Recovery Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 347
Inter-Farm Shared Services . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 348
Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 349
This chapter discusses the shared services functionality of Microsoft Office Share-
Point Portal Server 2003. Shared services provide common storage and management
capabilities for alerts, audiences, user profiles, My Sites, and search between multiple
portal sites on the same farm or between farms. This chapter will discuss when
and why shared services should be used and how to enable shared services.
Multiple Portal Sites
There are many reasons an organization would choose to run multiple portal sites on
the same server farm. For example, there could be a corporate news portal site that
has information about what is going on in the company and then portal sites for each
division, such as Legal, Human Resources (HR), or Marketing. That is a perfectly fine
structure, but you could also choose to have a corporate portal site with divisional
topics in that portal site, and then have portal sites for each major team. For example,
a software company might have portal sites for each product. It is really up to each
individual organization to determine the structure of the server farm.
There are several things to consider when determining how many portal sites
to use, however. The first consideration is resources. Full portal sites consume a significant
amount of RAM. They can also use a lot of processing power, depending on
the number of users. In a single-server environment or small server farm, it is expensive
to host many non–shared services portal sites. Each non–shared services portal site
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