Profile services are used to import information about existing portal users from external systems. This information is mapped to portal properties and made available to other services.
The purpose of a profile service is to import information about portal users from an external system into the portal so that the information can be used by the portal and other services. The first step is to synchronize the user information in the external system with existing users in the portal; this is the process that must be handled by the remote service. As with authentication services, the synchronization process is handled by the portal Automation Server, as scheduled in the Job associated with the Profile Source object in the portal.
The profile information imported by the profile service must be associated with portal properties so that it can be accessed by portal objects and other remote services.
The following topics provide detailed instructions on developing custom profile services: