I just received a call from a good friend at HP with whom I used to train here in MSP. I'm not sure if he'd want me to use his name, so I'll refrain from telling you who it is - but he is someone that everyone on this list should meet.
Anyways, he was asking about how to do search and indexing in a shared services environment across a wide-area network. My initial (and probably) only real response was this: buy more bandwidth.
Here's a sample scenario (not HP's): let's say you have 50,000 users in the US and another 30,000 in Europe and another 20,000 in Asia. You want a single set of personal portals and a single, robust index across all three continents. Multiple languages is not an issue. So, how do you do this? Do you setup a Search and another Index server in each location? If you have enough bandwidth between the index and search servers, I suppose you could. But then, you would find that sometimes, Asia people would be sent to the Europe Search servers to execute their query and other times, users would be hitting the local Search server in their continent.
This is because the web servers don't have the ability to differentiate between search servers that are sitting on either side of a WAN link. They just see 2, 3 or 4 search servers in the farm and proxy search queries to the search servers for execution. How they do this - the logic they use - is unknown to me. If anyone knows what this is, please post back here.
This is why I say that SPS03 is really not ready for a wide-area network, geo-distributed environment. It really is best if all the servers in the farm are in the same physical location, preferably (but not required, of course) that they exist on the same subnet.
Shared services is a very under-documented feature. I've learned alot about it in the last 2 months and perhaps should lead a Live Meeting discussion on it, but be prepared to not find much in the way of documentation on Shared Services is a distributed environment or in a multi-forest environment either.
Bill English
Mindsharp