Cross-Farm Service Application Publishing

To start the process of cross farm service application publishing in SharePoint 2013, first look at the post about establishing STS trust between farms. You also need to have the farm IDs of the farms that are going to consume the service applications in hand.







So, let's assume the STS trust is established, now the steps to publish and then consume the services are:









1. On the source farm, go to Central Admin -> Application Management -> Manage service applications, select the one you want to publish (in this example Search) and click Publish from the top ribbon.














You could also achieve this with PowerShell:







Publish-SPServiceApplication -Identity <ServiceApplicationGUID>



If you do not know the GUID of the service application, you can use the following Windows PowerShell 3.0 cmdlet to list all service applications in the farm, together with their GUIDS:
Get-SPServiceApplication



2. Select the "Publish this Service Application to other farms" option. I recommend using https connection. 









Take a note of the Published URL and save it.






3. Grant permissions to the consuming farms on the source service application by using the consuming farm IDs. 





4. Now, go to the consuming farm(s) Central Admin -> Application Management -> Manage service applicatoins and click Connect. Now insert the address that you've saved in Step 2. The server hostname in the example screenshot is removed on purpose.






5. Now choose the service application that will be provided as a choice to you. In our example - Search Service.



Leave the option “Add this service application’s proxy to the farm’s default proxy list” ticked and click OK.








6. On the next screen, you can choose a name of the service application. Finally you'll get a confirmation that you've connected successfully.


If you're consuming remote Managed Metadata Service, there is an additional setting to be set that will prevent errors when trying to update some of the user profile properties through MySites:













Select this one as well (not related to the issue above), but needed if you want to map custom user profile properties to term sets: