How does one make Two Physical MOSS farms appear to be one seamless MOSS to the portal users ?

How does one make Two Physical MOSS farms appear to be one seamless MOSS to the portal users ?

My initial problem is as follows:

I'm faced with the old problem of service separation, where one service provider looks after content management and the other
looks after applications.

The content management provider will have MOSS in place and there are a some worries re service availability, finding out what is
not working etc.. so it would be handy if we could have a second MOSS that lives with the application service provider which
houses all the custom webparts that will talk to back end applications. Then present these two MOSS, such that they appear to
internal and external users to be one MOSS.

The part that I find confusing is how does one have webparts from these two different server farms appear to be one MOSS. Since my
understanding is that we cannot really have a remote webpart.
Do I nominate one of the MOSS's to be the master site, where everyone is initially sent by the load balancers, and then the master
site effectively ends up collecting the web parts from the two MOSS farms in some manner?
Note If we did this, we'd plan to use a shared SSP

Hulicat
Thu Aug 02 19:26:24 CDT 2007

On Aug 2, 9:27 am, The Almost Real Moo (moo...@moo.com) wrote:
> How does one make Two Physical MOSS farms appear to be one seamless MOSS to the portal users ?
>
> My initial problem is as follows:
>
> I'm faced with the old problem of service separation, where one service provider looks after content management and the other
> looks after applications.
>
> The content management provider will have MOSS in place and there are a some worries re service availability, finding out what is
> not working etc.. so it would be handy if we could have a second MOSS that lives with the application service provider which
> houses all the custom webparts that will talk to back end applications. Then present these two MOSS, such that they appear to
> internal and external users to be one MOSS.
>
> The part that I find confusing is how does one have webparts from these two different server farms appear to be one MOSS. Since my
> understanding is that we cannot really have a remote webpart.
> Do I nominate one of the MOSS's to be the master site, where everyone is initially sent by the load balancers, and then the master
> site effectively ends up collecting the web parts from the two MOSS farms in some manner?
> Note If we did this, we'd plan to use a shared SSP

Maybe it's me.....I dont understand what you're trying to accomplish.

Are trying to use 2nd MOSS environment as a "hot stand by"?

MartinNr5
Fri Aug 03 03:58:22 CDT 2007

On Aug 2, 6:27 pm, The Almost Real Moo (moo...@moo.com) wrote:
> How does one make Two Physical MOSS farms appear to be one seamless MOSS to the portal users ?
>
> My initial problem is as follows:
>
> I'm faced with the old problem of service separation, where one service provider looks after content management and the other
> looks after applications.
>
> The content management provider will have MOSS in place and there are a some worries re service availability, finding out what is
> not working etc.. so it would be handy if we could have a second MOSS that lives with the application service provider which
> houses all the custom webparts that will talk to back end applications. Then present these two MOSS, such that they appear to
> internal and external users to be one MOSS.
>
> The part that I find confusing is how does one have webparts from these two different server farms appear to be one MOSS. Since my
> understanding is that we cannot really have a remote webpart.
> Do I nominate one of the MOSS's to be the master site, where everyone is initially sent by the load balancers, and then the master
> site effectively ends up collecting the web parts from the two MOSS farms in some manner?
> Note If we did this, we'd plan to use a shared SSP

Hi.

I think I understand what you're trying to accomplish, I'm just not
sure that you're going about it the best way.

When you say "service providers", are these external or internal? Are
they/do they have to be physically separated? If so - why?

Off the top of my head it sounds a lot more complex to try and "merge"
two separate MOSS - somewhat depending on how similar they need to
appear to the end user - than having the content management MOSS house
the webparts that talks to the back end apps as well.

The way you describe it the "back end" MOSS becomes another layer
between the back-end apps and the "front end" MOSS.

If you can't put the two roles on the same MOSS then I guess you could
talk to the back end MOSS via Web Services as pretty much everything
is exposed through them. It requires you to create connections for
this in the Business Data Catalog of the front-end though (which in
turn requires an Enterprise CAL).

You could, as a quick and dirty solution, just add a new tab(s) on the
front-end MOSS that links to the relevant part(s) in the back end
MOSS, provided they are exposed via http.

Sorry for not giving you a straightforward answer but you have a
rather odd setup. :)


-- Martin