SharePoint 2007 – How to Fix ‘Access Denied’ Activating Publishing Feature

This is a quick fix for “Access denied” errors received while attempting to activate the Publishing Infrastructure feature for a SharePoint 2007 site collection. After the feature is enabled, make sure you remember to switch the App Pool back!

Step 1: Right click on ‘My Computer’ and select ‘Manage’.

Step 2: Expand ‘Services' and Applications’, then ‘IIS Manager’.

Step 3: Expand ‘Web Sites’, then right click on your MOSS web site.

Step 4: Select ‘Properties’, then the ‘Home Directory’ tab.

Step 5: Change the 'Application Pool' to 'SharePoint Central Administration' and select ‘OK’.

Step 6: From the command-line, execute ‘IISRESET’.

Step 7:  Enable the ‘Publishing Infrastructure’ feature within ‘Site collection features’. For detailed instructions for this step, please see this post.