Recently the evaluation version of MOSS 2007 on our development server timed out. Whoever installed it did not have the Enterprise key and installed the trial version. After needing to do some demo screen shots for a presentation I was the one that discovered it! Of course nobody else was around to fix it for me. So I contacted our IT department and got the key from them (my company is an Microsoft Gold Partner). Armed with the key and full of confidence I tried to activate the enterprise features (Central Administration>Operations>Upgrade and Migration>Enable Enterprise Features) and got this beauty:
“An error occurred while enabling Enterprise features…”
Scratching around on the internet a bit, it seems this is (unsurprisingly) uncommon occurence! Eventually I found the resolution buried in the n-th comment reply to somebody’s question on the same error. It seems the Windows SharePoint Services Timer service needs to be run under an account with administrative priveledges in order to complete the job that gets created when you upgrade to Enterprise features. In our case the service was running on the Network Services account which did not seem to have enough priviledges.
Once you changed the account logon, remember to restart the service and delete any existing enterprise activation job (Central Administration>Global Configuration>Timer job definitions) before you retry the feature activation.
After enabling the Enterprise features you may also want to restart IIS and remember to enable the enterprise features on all the relevant sites!
