Tip 25: Check Up On Your Web Services

This tip is for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.

Just like a teenager, the Office Server Web Services need checking on from time to time as they both tend to get into trouble when left to their own devices.

So what are the Office Server Web Services? When would you want to check them and what can you do to make sure they are working correctly?

The Office Server Web Services at the most basic level is an IIS web application that contains the .asmx web service files used by SharePoint for some of the functions in the SSP like search and Excel Services. You will want to check the web services when your SharePoint servers have entries like the following in the ULS diagnostic logs or in an application Event Log ID #6482; “The underlying connection was closed: An unexpected error occurred on a send.”. Other effects that can occur when the web services are not working are profile information is not being updated in SharePoint web applications/sites and search gatherer not indexing.

So the quick way to check the health of the web services is to browse the following URLs in Internet Explorer from each SharePoint server in the farm. If you can see a list of web service methods like the images below the URLs, then the web services are working. Note that on the SSL URLs you will have to click continue on the IE window to ignore the untrusted certificate.

http://<APPSERVER>:56737/SearchAdmin.asmx

https://<APPSERVER>:56738/SearchAdmin.asmx

http://<APPSERVER>:56737/<SSPTITLE>/Search/SearchAdmin.asmx

https://<APPSERVER>:56738/<SSPTITLE>/Search/SearchAdmin.asmx