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When upgrading from a standard SKU to an Enterprise SKU in SharePoint (MOSS 2007), things can (and do) go wrong. Come to think of it, I’ve never seen one complete successfully without some type of manual intervention. Fortunately, the majority of errors that are experienced are recoverable. Take for instance:

An existing request to enable the Enterprise feature is in progress. To check the status of this request, go to the Timer Job Status page in Central Administration Operations and check the status of the Office Server Enterprise Features Upgrade Job.

When you find the job in the Timer Job Status page, you will see that it needs to run on all servers in your farm. Chances are it has failed on one (or more) servers. The quick fix? Restart (or start if stopped) the Windows SharePoint Services Timer service on the server where the upgrade job failed. After the job has completed, return to Central Administration to verify that your farm has been upgraded.

I recently ran into a strange quirk/bug when setting a target audience on a web part. In the particular site collection where the web part resides, a number of cross-site groups exist.

For the sake of example, imagine that the site collection has several cross-site groups with simlar names. Ex:

• IT
• IT Designers
• IT Administrators

When targeting the web part to either the IT Designers or IT Administrators cross-site group, the web part is able to correctly apply the audience.  However, when the IT group is used, the web part configuration for audiences is unable to determine the correct group when the web part is rendered on the page.

It would appear that when selecting a target audience (if it is a SharePoint group), the group name must be unique and not contain a portion of another group name. In my case, while the IT group name is unique, the IT Designers and IT Administrators groups also contain the string “IT”.