I’ve been doing my SharePoint development and testing using a locally installed instance of SharePoint. I originally installed my development environment following the instructions found in the MSDN library: “Setting Up the Development Environment for SharePoint 2010 on Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Windows Server 2008” which is basically the foundation level version.

This version of SharePoint was fine for quite a while, but the day came that I needed to create and test features that are found at the Standard or Enterprise levels. The good news is that you can install SharePoint Enterprise on top of your current installation and preserve the work you have already done (well, almost as I will explain later).

Unfortunately this installation wasn’t terribly smooth. It might have gone easier if I had stopped the SharePoint services and IIS, but the installation does this so that probably would not make any difference.

SharePoint installation files come with a configuration xml file. The  MSDN article I referenced above instructs you to add a tag within that file to enable installation on a windows client. I did that but the installation failed with some error about missing Office parts. I forgot that, in my original installation, I edited my configuration file to look like the xml file example in the MSDN article. So, after uninstalling SharePoint and editing the  configuration file again the installation went fine. Even better, when I launched SharePoint it opened up my original site!

So far, so good. Now to check on the Content Organizer feature, which was what I was primarily interested in.

Horrors! That feature wasn’t there! I rebooted and to my relief the Content Organizer feature appeared. So, going to my site features admin page I click the feature to activate it. That action generated an error:

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<em>The Site scoped feature being activated has a dependency on hidden Site Collection scoped feature 'FeatureDefinition/0c8a9a47-22a9-4798-82f1-00e62a96006e' (ID: '0c8a9a47-22a9-4798-82f1-00e62a96006e'). Hidden features cannot be auto-activated across scopes. There may be one or more visible Site Collection scoped features that auto-activate the dependent hidden feature.</em>
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What?! A file search came up with a Feature.xml file for the Document Routing Resources Feature. In that file there was a Hidden property set to “True.” After changing that to “False” (turns out the setting should be “True” which I corrected later) I tried the activation again. Got a little further – the error message clued me to enable the Enterprise Features in Document Collection. I went back through both “Manage Site Features” and “Site Collection Features” to make sure everything that might relevant was checked. Still not able to enable the Content Organizer feature.

OK, what to do next? In Central Admin (Update and Migration) I checked the “Enable Enterprise Features” link – the feature set was set to Enterprise, so that was OK. I noticed then the link for “Enable Features on Existing Sites.” Ahhh – that looked promising.  I checked the “enable” option and “OK.” The message back indicated success! Checking my site I found the Content Organizer was activated,  but then trying to add a content rule caused an error. Also when I deactivated the feature I could not reactivate it!

Looking at my Site Settings I noticed other anomalies: I saw “Navigation” rather than “Top Link Bar” under the “Look and Feel” section. I didn’t see “Term Store management” under “Site Administration.” So there was more wrong here than just the feature I was immediately interested in.

I next tried to create a new site based on the “Document Center” template knowing that Content Organizer would be one of the features. That failed completely with a message similar that I got when trying to enable the Content Organizer. I could create a Team Site, so SharePoint was not entirely broken.

One last thing I thought to try before completely uninstalling SharePoint. I deleted the Document Collection on my site. I then created a new Document Collection.

Finally – success! All the expected site features were there and they worked! I lost the work invested in my original site, but luckily it was more of a testbed so that was not a complete disaster for me.

So, removing the document collection for the root site fixed all the issues that appeared after updating my development SharePoint environment to the Enterprise Edition. It is an extreme action, though not as extreme as uninstalling and reinstalling SharePoint. I’m pretty sure that you can save your document collection and redeploy using some admin tools, but I’m not terribly familiar with them and  as I mentioned I wasn’t too concerned about losing the site. I had a couple other sites on the server that I deleted, so I don’t know if the enterprise features would have worked on them after removing the document collection on the root. That might be interesting to investigate.