Operation considerations before using Shared Services in Portal farm environment

Organizations should consider the following before providing or using Shared Services:

• Farms providing and using Shared Services must be running the same version of SharePoint Portal Server using the same language.
• A firewall cannot be used between server farms providing and using Shared Services. Both server farms must be on the intranet, on the extranet, or in a perimeter network (also known as DMZ, demilitarized zone, and screened subnet).
• Back up the server farm before configuring it to provide or use Shared Services. After the server farm has been configured for Shared Services, the operation cannot be undone.
• Some services and scheduled tasks in a server farm need to be turned off before the server farm is set up 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.
• After configuring a server farm to provide Shared Services, all other portal sites on that server farm become child portal sites.
• Server farms providing and using Shared Services must belong to the same domain or trusted domain.
• Services are shared at the server farm level. All portal sites on a server farm that uses Shared Services will, therefore, be child portal sites.
• A child portal site can never be changed into a parent portal site.
• When the server farm is configured to use Shared Services, services that are no longer required on the server farm using Shared Services are disabled.
• Backup the server farm immediately after configuring it to use Shared Services in order to preserve the initial state and configuration of the farm.

Security Considerations

• The portal site application pool for the server farm using Shared Services is, by default, a member of the "db_owner database role" in SQL Server on the profile, component settings, and content databases for the parent portal site.
• The configuration database administration account for the server farm using Shared Services is a member of the db_owner database role in SQL Server on the configuration database for the server farm providing Shared Services.