Sunday, May 20, 2007

"People Search" and My Site / SSP configuration

When you crawl the Local Office SharePoint Server sites content source and if you are getting the following error, you may want to check your SSP configuration

sps3://SERVERNAME ( MySite Application URL)
Error in PortalCrawl Web Service



What I discovered is while creating a new SSP, I did not create seperate web application for "Mysite" and "SSP Admin" ( as recommended by Microsoft), instead I created a single web application with two site collections - one for MySite and other for SSP admin . Now if you do this, SharePoint is not going to create a root Site Collection ie.. http://SERVERNAME:PORT (my site application) will be empty. This for whatever reasons causes stomach ache for SharePoint Indexer. If you go back and create a dummy Site Collection in the root of My Site Web application and then reindex your content source, the above error will go away ( at least it did for me)

Now, if you are still using SPS 2003 and getting similar error, you may want to check out MS Support article on this

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/835521