In the Oracle documentation, it indicates that the only parameter needed for enabling share servers is to set the 'SHARED_SERVERS' parameter to a non zero value. If the 'DISPATCHERS' parameter is neglected, Oracle will instantiate 1 dispatcher by default to handle shared server traffic. My SHARED_SERVER parameter is set to '2' and my DISPATCHERS parameter is set to "(protocol=TCP)". Nonetheless, I cannot connect to the server with anything but dedicated connections (verified by querying the v$sessions view). I have nothing in my sqlnet.ora file or my tnsnames.ora file that would force a dedicated connection to the server.