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Jim
Asked: 2009-06-30 05:43:02 +0800 CST

Do SharePoint farms have to be on the same service pack to share Shared Services?

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I have a parent farm on MOSS 2007 SP1. I'd like to share the parent's SSP search service with a child farm on MOSS 2007 SP2. But, I'm having trouble crawling content from the parent farm. Could it be a problem with the service pack levels?

Edit: More details I'm setting up inter-farm shared services.

In the crawl log on the parent server, I see this error: http://ChildFarm The object was not found. (The item was deleted because it was either not found or the crawler was denied access to it.)

I checked the account, and it has access. The parent farm previously had been able to crawl the child farm.

Edit: Clarification

  • ALL servers in the parent farm are at service pack 1.
  • ALL servers in the child farm are at service pack 2.

There is no mismatch between the service pack levels within each farm.

search sharepoint ssp

2 Answers

  1. Not sure a mismatch will cause the specific error you're seeing, but the documentation here and here says that you should apply all service packs to all members of a sharepoint farm. Seems clear enough to me.

    IIRC, they had similar documentation telling you much the same about patching levels for SP1 too.

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  2. Best Answer

    I had to talk to a few Microsoft consultants about this one. Even the core product team struggled to give us an answer. In the end, it was decided that farms do NOT have to be on the same service pack level to share services. Our search service shared from a farm with SP1 from a could be consumed from a farm on SP2. For us, it worked. I could imagine scenarios where the differences would be big enough that problems would occur, but for us it is not a problem. Sharing services between farms with different service packs works fine.

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