Automating Microsoft® SharePoint® 2010 Administration with Windows PowerShell® 2.0

Publish and Consume Service Applications Across Farms

For large enterprises or organizations with large or otherwise complex architectural requirements for which the simple, single-Farm deployment approach is insufficient, SharePoint 2010 now gives us the ability to create Services Farms, or Farms that publish one or more Service Applications for use by other Farms. Publishing Service Applications to other Farms helps to optimize resources, avoid redundancy, and provide enterprise-wide services.

If you look within the Manage Service Applications page in the Central Administration site and click the Connect drop-down button in the Ribbon, as shown in Figure 11.7, you might think that there are at least 11 Service Applications that can be consumed ...