If you cannot compile an audience and get no error

Description:
Recently I was at a customer site where we were implementing a MOSS based solution. while moving to the production - after a backup and restore process we tried to create several audiences and when we tried compiling them they did not compile successfully but we got no indication for an error.

After a quick view at the server's event viewer – we found some SharePoint error message like: 'Failed to compile 'my audience' audience. Exception was: 'Failed to obtain crawl status.'

A quick search reveled that during the restore process our SSP (SharedServicesProvider for MOSS) did not have a search indexer defined.

In order to fix this problem what we had to do is:
1. make sure the office SharePoint services search service is active on our farm (in central administration->operations->services on server)
2. Go to central administration->application->configure the SSP we are using and select search indexer server from the drop down list (after step 1 this options should not be empty)
3. Done.

Now the compilation could be completed!

Hope this helps you guys,

Shai Ben Shooshan
SharePoint TechnologySpecialist
KWizCom Knowledge Worker Components
shai@kwizcom.com
http://www.kwizcom.com