SharePoint SSP Site – Page not found error

Problem:
I have faced a problem when trying to access the SSP site (Shared Services Provider) I was getting page not found error.

Cause:
After doing long investigation on this issue, I have found that the problem happened because initially when I created my first web application (SharePoint Site) with the installation of SharePoint and then created and associated my SSP with it, the link for my SSP was http://servername/ssp/admin and this application was running under port 80. Later on, when I have changed the SharePoint site (web application) to be 90 ( http://servername:90 ), the SSP will continue to have the same link http://servername/ssp/admin assuming that the site is running under port 80 which is not valid anymore and will cause the “PAGE NOT FOUND” error because the main site is now http://servername:90 and not http://servername

Solution:
There are many solutions if you faced this problem.
1. Simply you access your SSP by putting the right link of the server with the correct port number like http://servername:90/ssp/admin

2. Another solution to avoid this problem is that whenever you create a web application (SharePoint Site) and wants to change its default port, do it then create your SSP and associate it with the application.

3. A third solution will be to create a new SSP and then associate it with your site and you can delete the old SSP.
I hope this article was useful because it took effort to figure it out.

Regards,

Hamzeh Ayesh

Enable Search feature in MOSS 2007

Search feature in MOSS 2007 is a great feature and also a big one, it has many aspects between defining your own key words, adding new file types to be searched, searching contents from outside the SharePoint site and many others, but here I will focus on how to enable the search functionality in your site to be able to search your site’s content as follows:

1. Go to your “Site Actions” menu on your site -> Site Settings -> Modify All Site Settings
2. Go to “Search Visibility”
3. Select “Allow this web to appear in search results” to Yes
4. Select “Always index all ASPX pages on this site”
5. Then in your SharePoint Central Administration, go to Operations tab
6. Go to “Services on Server”
7. Run your “Office SharePoint Server Search” service with the correct credentials.
8. Also in the SharePoint Central Administration, go to your Shared Services Provider link
9. Go to “Search Settings”
10. Select “Content sources and crawl schedules”
11. Hover over the link “Local SharePoint Server Sites” and select “Start Full Crawl” in order to start indexing all your site contents.
12. Go to your SharePoint site and start searching.

Regards,

Hamzeh Ayesh

Service Unavailable - SharePoint Site

Good Morning:

Problem:

Sometimes when you run your SharePoint Site you may face an error saying "Service Unavailable".

Cause of the Problem:

There could be many reasons behind this error to be accurate, but most probably this problem will happen if you change your current account password, what will happen is that the pool's identity that runs your SharePoint site was saved with the initial password when you created the SharePoint site so when you change this password, the pool will be still running under the old password which will cause this error to happen.

Solution:

1. Go to IIS->Application Pools-> select your pool -> right click -> properties -> identity tab and change the password to the new password.
2. Reset IIS
3. This should solve the problem.

Hint:
You can also go to the Administrative Tools -> Services and check all SharePoint services if any of them is running under your identity and reset to the new password if it was changed.

Regards,

Hamzeh Ayesh