Integrate Project Server with MOSS and SSP

If you are going to integrate Project Server 2007 with MOSS, you may want to use a seperated Shared Services Provider to host it.

During our pre-migration testing, we setup an integrated Project Server 2007 and move databases from the pilot environment. Couple days later the entire project server crashed and we had no clue why it happened.

After we discussed the whole situation with Microsoft, we were told die to the nature of Project Server, we should use a separated SSP to host.

Since we already created a SSP for the entire MOSS farm, the process included:

• Create two new SSPs.
• Move portal, mysite, search and indexing to one of the new SSPs.
• Create PWA under the 2nd new SSPs.
• Other than hosting PWA, do not use the 2nd SSP to do profile importing, content crawling or any other services if it's not required.

We implemented suggested settings to our server farm and so far so good. If you plan to do so, I will recommend to find a development/staging environment and document all the steps to create these two SSPs for your MOSS environment.

Happy Holiday

Still hard to believe it's the end of 2008. I feel that I just mailed our 2007 X'mas card yesterday.

This is a pretty busy year to me. I moved to a new job and do not have to face some unpleasant situation. I had my first SharePoint speech at the conference earlier this year. I also had chance to meet several SharePoint experts face to face.

Wish everyone a happy holiday and new year.

Move on to a new position

Since late July I was moved to (long story) an external government contract. I was kind getting the messages and started looking around.

Fortunately, I received a good offer to work on over all MOSS and Project Server architect, deployment and development. So I moved on to the new one starting Thanksgiving week. Pretty exciting and looking forward to learn lots new knowledge.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Access is denied when I schedule content crawling

I worked on the search crawling schedule in a server farm and received an error message like:

Access is denied (Exception from HRESULT:....)

However, I was able to start a manual content crawling without difficulties. So what happened?

Microsoft has a KB article to explain this situation and the link is:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/926959. I was glad to find out a solution so quick. But then I wondered, which server I should apply this change to?

Since the environment I deployed has separated front-ends, index and query servers and this article and other web site did not give me clear direction.

After I analyzed the situation and found out I should apply this to the index server, since index server is the one performing this scheduled task.

I followed the KB article and made changes to the index server, everything worked as it should be.

Perhaps next time when we publish some thoughts or instructions and we are using a server farm, includes which server we apply changes to fix the problems may be very help.

Just a thought.

SharePoint Best Practice Conference - washington DC

If you knew the new SharePoint Best Practice book by Ben and Bills, this is kind like a extension to the book and concepts.

There are lots talks regarding how great SharePoint can do technology wise, how about the business needs? How about a good start to deploy it? What do we, as a technical person to work on this product, miss and could learn from other experts?

Here is the web site for more details. Looking forward to hear any opinions.

Deployed a Large Server Farm Today

Today is a good day to me since I worked with our client to finish 2 days server farm deployment.

We have 8 servers in this farm: two web front end, one index server, one query server, one project server, one Excel service server and two SQL clustered server.

I joked to my client that I will bump my head to the wall three times since I misunderstood that we have to use Kerberos to deploy a farm like this. So today's reault gave me one good and one bad thing:

1. It approved that I was wrong and I learned from it with well documented steps.

2. I have to find out why my previous test deployment failed with authentication errors,which definitely has nothing to do with Kerberos.

I will put my experience here since I believe some points should be cleared.

This is definitely a good feeling to enjoy the whole weekend after some unpleasant issues, especially I learned more today.

Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Servers

Microsoft recently released a new update targeting Office Servers, including MOSS and WSS 3.

One of the feeture I was looking for answers was Federated Search. In the description of this update, Microsoft added this functionality to MOSS's search features. This makes me pretty exciting to know and want to try ASAP.

The details of the update can be found here:
Install the Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Servers (Office SharePoint Server 2007)

Description of the Microsoft Office Servers Infrastructure Update: July 15, 2008

Issues that are fixed in Microsoft Office Servers by the Microsoft Office Servers Infrastructure Update

I will add more infromation and reactions from the community later.

Have fun.