Many of the objects in the portal use web services, which are components that run on a logically separate computer from the one that runs the portal and communicate with the portal via HTTP. We refer to this separate computer as a remote server. The web service architecture allows multiple types of remote services (authentication sources, content crawlers, outgoing federated searches, portlets, and profile sources) to share a logical remote server, making it easier to manage the computers that make up the portal.

Web services also allow you to share settings (sometimes rather complex settings) with the objects created from those services. For example, administrative users creating portlet web services need a greater understanding of the structure of the portlet, because they need to specify whether the portlet has preferences or whether it sends user information; whereas users creating portlets from that web service might only need to set configuration settings appropriate for a non-technical user.

In addition, web services enable you to create composite applications that utilize functionality from multiple web services. For example, you might have several web services accessing an application that requires user credentials. Rather than creating a separate configuration page for each web service and requiring users to specify the same information multiple times, you can create a link to these shared settings, allowing users to specify the information only once for all of these web services.