How to remove a SharePoint Shared Services Provider (SSP)

Warning It is not a good idea to remove the SSP once MOSS 2007 is hosting functional web applications.

This tip is for removing a SharePoint Shared Service Provider which is not working correctly due to misconfiguration issues during its installation or configuration

As the name implies Shared Services Provider manages and provides several services to all web applications running on a given MOSS installation.

Some of these services are: Profile import, search , all Excel services.

Each of the web applications on MOSS 2007 don't handle the above services by themselves but rather they go to the provider of these services: SharePoint Services provider.

Some times after installing and configuring the SSP you may notice some errors and the dreaded: "Provisioning in Progress".

As you can see from the screen shot below the delete option has been disabled

So How do we removed the SSP in order to install and configure it again?

The steps to remove the SSP are the following:

1. Obtain the GUID of the SSP.

This can be done by clicking on the 'properties' option of the menu

SSP GUID

2. Now that we have the guid we just append this GUID to the Admin delete page:

So ...../_admin/deletessp.aspx
becomes ...../_admin/deletessp.aspx?sspId=d578f420-9a85-4b78-b43d-e704576a6453

When removing the SSP We just need to make sure we select the option "Remove and delete the associated databases" to avoid having orphans databases.

Resources:

http://netindonesia.net/blogs/cakriwut/archive/2007/08/26/MOSS-2007_3A00_-How-to-delete-default-Shared-Service_3F00_.aspx

https://msmvps.com/blogs/shane/archive/2007/06/29/what-is-a-shared-service-provider.aspx