Manage session state (Office SharePoint Server)

  • Article

Applies To: Office SharePoint Server 2007

This Office product will reach end of support on October 10, 2017. To stay supported, you will need to upgrade. For more information, see , Resources to help you upgrade your Office 2007 servers and clients.

 

Topic Last Modified: 2016-11-14

In this article:

  • Prerequisites for session state

  • Enable or disable session state

The Session State service in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is a farm-level service that takes advantage of the underlying ASP.NET session state implementation. Enabling session state allows browser sessions to be established, with session information stored in an SQL database to minimize transfer of data over the network every time a postback takes place. Session state also permits sessions to exist between load-balanced front-end Web servers without the end user being aware that there are multiple servers. The load balancer distributes sessions across the front-end Web servers, and the session state implementation sets up the state on each front-end Web server. Session state is enabled by default. Session state can be disabled for troubleshooting purposes, but if it is disabled, many Office SharePoint Server services and components will no longer function.

When you create the first Shared Services Provider (SSP) for a farm, the database tables and code required for session state to operate are installed and configured automatically.

Note

For more information about ASP.NET session state, see ASP.NET Session State Overview (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=78213&clcid=0x409) on the Microsoft Web site.

Prerequisites for session state

In order to enable session state for the farm, you must first configure an SSP for a Web application. Without an SSP configured and associated with a Web application, session state will not function on the farm. If there is already an SSP associated with a Web application, you can go straight to Enable or disable session state. For more information about creating an SSP, see Configure the primary Shared Services Provider.

Enable or disable session state

By default, session state is enabled. Session state can be disabled for troubleshooting purposes, but if it is disabled, many Office SharePoint Server services and components will no longer function. Changing this property will modify the Web.config file on every content Web application on every server in the farm.

Note

Session state does not work on the SharePoint Central Administration Web site.

Enable or disable session state across the entire farm

  1. On the taskbar, click Start, point to Administrative Tools, and then click SharePoint 3.0 Central Administration.

  2. In the top navigation bar, click the Application Management tab.

  3. On the Application Management page, in the Office SharePoint Servers Shared Services section, click Configure session state.

  4. On the Configure Session State page, in the Enable Session State section, select the Enable Session State check box to enable session state for the farm.

  5. To specify the duration of sessions, in the Timeout section, enter a number (in minutes) in the Session should be timed out after (minutes) box. The default is 60 minutes.

  6. Click OK to save the session state configuration.