SharePoint 2007 – Why can’t I schedule profile imports?

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I recently had an interesting issue where the customer was getting the following errors accessing the User Profiles and properties link within his SSP.

“An error has occurred while accessing the SQL Server database or the Office SharePoint Server Search service. If this is the first time you have seen this message, try again later. If this problem persists, contact your administrator.”

Notice in the below picture that the schedule fields are blank.

UserProfileandPropPage

 

When accessing “Configure Profile Import”, you will see the following error:

An error has occurred while accessing the SQL Server database or the Office SharePoint Server Search service. If this is the first time you have seen this message, try again later. If this problem persists, contact your administrator.

 

UserProfileandPropPage2

 

Also, within the Configure Profile Import page, you will see the following error within Incremental Import Schedule:

“Unable to obtain schedule information. Please verify that the job server is up and connected to the farm.”

UserProfileandPropPage3

 

As a result, profile imports are unable to be scheduled.

 

Question and Answer

Question: What causes this?

Answer: This can happen when one of the hidden SSP timer jobs is deleted via stsadm –o deletessptimerjobs. Specifically in this case, the User Profile Incremental Import Job timer job was missing.

 

Question: How do I validate I’m missing one of the SSP timer jobs?

Answer:   You can run the following from the bin directory:

stsadm –o enumssptimerjobs –title “nameofssp”

SSP Timer Job Id=”d29a1e4b-268d-4bb8-90b9-003935407f6b” Display Name=”User Profile Change Job”

SSP Timer Job Id=”80395702-10aa-46bb-91f8-014bedaf7184″ Display Name=”Audience Compilation Job”

SSP Timer Job Id=”3565824b-d79a-4b5e-9af9-06653c8564b0″ Display Name=”User Profile Full Import Job”

SSP Timer Job Id=”a7e410e3-abdf-4833-b9fe-a2e8b2863182″ Display Name=”Distribution List Import Job”

SSP Timer Job Id=”1fad8b5e-6b2b-48f3-ae79-aa17afb5ca11″ Display Name=”User Profile Change Cleanup Job”

SSP Timer Job Id=”1zfl8b5a-9g3g-59q9-wr41-mm22afb7kia1″ Display Name=”User Profile Incremental Import Job”

 

In this particular case, the User Profile Incremental Import Job was missing. Unfortunately, the only supported resolution is creating a new SSP or restoring the SSP from backup. I’ve seen some external public documentation suggesting a fix which includes directly editing the associated SharePoint SSP database. Please be aware that any direct edits to the database is strictly unsupported by Microsoft. Also, I would shy away from using the deletessptimerjob operation for this exact reason.

 

References:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc512098(office.12).aspx

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262978(office.12).aspx

 

 Thanks,

-Russmax