How Bill Gates uses Office

Get a sneak into Bill's Office, and see how he's using Office 2007 to carry out his day-to-day tasks here.

Shared Services Provider Deletion

Case Scenario:

Let's say you have a MOSS 2007 installation, this installatino uses the default Shared Services Provider , after a while you needed to create a new Shared Services Provider, move all the current web applications to this new SSP, then delete the first SSP.
It sounds easy and straight forward, but while trying to carry out the above scenario, I have gone through some problems.
I created a new SSP, gave it a meaningful name such as SharedServices_Farm, from the Central Administration site, I clicked Shared Services Administratino, and changed all the associations of the web applications to my newly created SSP, then I tried to deleted the first SSP, but MOSS notified that I would never be able to deleted until I make another SSP a default one, as you can never delete a default SSP, I marked my new SSP as default one, then chose to delete the first one, and I selected deleting the SSP database as well, it went well, but after getting back to "Manage this Farm's Shared Services", I,yet, found the first SSP listed and the status of it was "Unprovisioning"!
I didn't mind to keep it like that, but after a while I found out that Search is not working for old site collections that were bound to the first SSP, after checking logs, it was always trying to open the deleted SSP database!
I have tried so many tricks and googled alot, but couldn't resolve it, then I reliazed that I am not alone with this problem, some other folks came through it, it seems to be a bug, hope Microsoft resolves it with MOSS SP1.

Resolution

Run the command line tool stsadm, and enter the following line:

STSADM -o deletessp -title -force

Get back to the list of SSPs in the Central Administratino site, Happily, you will not find the deleted SSP, and your search will get back to work , but you might need to start the crawling process, you can do the following steps:

1. Click the new Shared Services Provider.
2. Under Search group, select Search Settings.
3. Click "Content sources and crawl schedules"
4. Click the menu of "Local Office SharePoint Server Sites", and select "Start Full Crawl".