Back after 8 months hiatus.

In the interum, we wiped everything and started from stratch. SharePoint Experts did a great job holding our hand through *every* step of setting up a basic SharePoint infrastructure. (Thanks, Matt!)

So first day getting back to making something. And got an error! wow.

When I tried to activate the Office SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure on the site collection, SharePoint simply responded, "Access Denied"

Digging in the log files says:

"07/17/2008 12:00:37.13     w3wp.exe (0x07BC)                           0x1850    Windows SharePoint Services       General                           72by    High        Feature Activation: Threw an exception, attempting to roll back.  Feature 'PublishingResources' (ID: 'aebc918d-b20f-4a11-a1db-9ed84d79c87e').  Exception: Microsoft.SharePoint.SPException: Provisioning did not succeed. Details: Failed to provision the scheduling job definitions.  Page scheduling will not succeed. OriginalException: Access denied. ---> System.Security.SecurityException: Access denied.     at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPPersistedObject.Update()     at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPJobDefinition.Update()     at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPWorkItemJobDefinition.Update()     at Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Internal.RootProvisioner.<>c__DisplayClass5.<AddSchedulingJobDefinitions>b__4()     at Microsoft.SharePoint.SPSecurity.CodeToRunElevatedWrapper(...     

Fortunately I quickly found a fix thanks to SharePoint MVP Vincent Rothwell at http://blog.thekid.me.uk/archive/2007/02/05/activating-office-sharepoint-server-publishing-infrastructure-access-denied.aspx

...I recently had to activate the publishing infrastucture on a WSS v3 Teamsite. This had always worked before, but now I was getting ‘Access Denied’ when activating the ‘Server Publishing Infrastructure’.

This was due to my change in devlopment procedure. I always used to create development farms using Administrator for everything, but scince I found problems with feature activation I am developing using the Microsoft Guidelines for MOSS accounts. This means the AppPool account has limited permissions.

To solve the ‘Access Denied’ problem you need to elevate the permissions of the AppPool of the web application on which you are trying to activate the Publishing Infrastructure feature.

One way to achieve this is to temporarily change the AppPool of the web application…

1. Open IIS Admin.
2. Location the Web Site for your WSS web application.
3. Goto to the properties and select the ‘Home Directory’ tab.
4. Change the AppPool to be the same as Central Administration.
5. IISRESET
6. Activate the Publishing Infrastructure feature on your site.
7. Change to AppPool back to the original.
8. IISRESET.

This should allow you to enable the feature and use the publishing features within MOSS.