I thought I would post this little gem so I don’t forget it. Hopefully it will be of use to someone else as well.
In the last couple of weeks a few people have told me about issues they encountered running Project Server 2010 workflows on a farm where the web front-end service has been deactivated. Deactivating the service can make sense if you are configuring the farm for improved performance by removing the need to listen to and render pages, or when trying to reduce the attack surface (although this is a lesser concern).
Anyway, to cut a long story short, it seems that when you turn the services off, you need to tell Project Server that the service has been turned off and to update it’s workflow configuration settings. Thanks to Sameh, one of the excellent support guys at Nintex who found the procedure hidden away in an MSDN article from August 2010 at
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/ff459292(v=office.14).aspx
I haven’t had a chance to test if this on a Project Server 2013 farm using the SharePoint 2010 workflow engine, but I would imagine the same will apply.
