What is User Profile ?

A personal profile about each user includes properties such as a user’s title, e-mail, distri-bution list membership, and contact details. It is typically imported by SharePoint from a directory such as Active Directory, but it can also be manually created directly inside SharePoint. User profiles can be customized in SharePoint to include additional details, such as birthday and interests. Personal profile are used throughout SharePoint Server 2007 to disseminate or target information to users, help users locate colleagues with sim-ilar interests, and return search results on people.Its available for MOSS only.

Deleting the default SSP (Shared Service Provider)

Scenario:
You want to delete the Shared Service Provider which has Web Applications attached to it.

Steps:
1. Delete the associated Web Applications OR Change the association to another SSP
2. Delete the SSP using following STSADM command

stsadm -o deletessp -title "shared service name" -deletedatabases

What is Shared Service Provider ?

An SSP represents a set of services that can be configured a single time and shared across many different MOSS portal sites and WSS sites. Understanding SSPs is critical to being able to take advantage of MOSS features and services.The major services that are handled by the SSP are:

• User Profiles and Audiences
• My Sites
• Search
• Excel Services
• Business Data Catalog (BDC )

Within a MOSS 2007 farm, each Web application is associated with exactly one SSP. One Web application can be associated with one SSP while a different Web application can be associated with a second SSP. The MOSS portal sites and WSS team sites will use the SSP configuration for their parent Web application. As a result, the search results from within one portal site might be very different from the search results within another portal site if they are associated with different SSPs that have been configured to have different content sources.