SharePoint Portal Server Architecture

Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services and Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 share the same underlying technologies. This is a change from the first version of SharePoint Portal Server. Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2001 did not share underlying technology with SharePoint Team Services from Microsoft. In this version of Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies, SharePoint Portal Server, as the server product, works with and builds upon the architecture of Windows SharePoint Services. This chapter does not cover the feature differences between SharePoint Portal Server and Windows SharePoint Services. Instead, it focuses on the architectural differences that are found in SharePoint Portal Server and explains the architecture of services that are particular to SharePoint Portal Server.


SharePoint Portal Server includes services that are not offered in Windows SharePoint Services. These services can be viewed in the Services application in Control Panel and include the Administration service, the SharePoint Portal Alert service, the Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server Search service, and the Microsoft Single Sign-On service.
During installation, all services that SharePoint Portal Server can provide are installed regardless of which services you choose to install. The services are then enabled or disabled based on which services the administrator chooses to provide to users.

SharePoint Portal Server installs an administration service, called SharePoint Portal Administration, that appears as SPSAdmin in the Services application in Control Panel. SPS Admin can stop and start services that SharePoint Portal Server needs, including SPSSearch. It can also add or delete catalogs and can add or delete search applications as needed.


The purpose of the SharePoint Portal Alert service is to notify a user, when the user requests it, that there is a change to a designated item, document, list, or document library on the website. Alerts are managed by the job server.


When shared services is implemented, child portal sites look to the parent’s configuration database for shared services data. Although some data is still needed from the original databases used by the child sites after shared services is configured, most information is retrieved from the parent site’s databases. By default, each portal site has two user accounts that are used to access databases. These accounts are called the configuration database administration account and the application pool account for the portal site.