Sharepoint 2007-2010 Migration: Feature {GUID} for list template ‘xxx’ is not installed on this farm
April 18, 2011 - No Comments
by John Cummings
If you have a lot of content that you’re migrating from MOSS 2007 to Sharepoint 2010, you’ll more than likely run in to a few site collections that refuse to render, and instead give you a screen that looks something like the one below:
Once you get past the anger you’ll feel at reading an error message like “An unexpected error has occurred” (really guys, this is the best you can do on the third try? Aren’t all “errors” unexpected?) you’ll want to find out what’s really causing the problem.
It’s time to familiarize yourself with Sharepoint Trace Logs and the Unified Logging Service. ULS logs are actually pretty helpful – once you figure out how to track down the information you need.
There are two things you’ll want to know. First, that “Correlation ID” that you see in the error message above is going to be pretty important. It’s how you’re going to track down the real cause of your problem in the ULS logs. The second thing you’re going to need is an easy way to read and filter the ULS log entries. Since these files can get pretty large, and if you’re like me you don’t love line by line scanning of massive text files, it would make sense to download the free Sharepoint ULS Log Viewer from the Codeplex site.
This tool is going to allow you to point it at your ULS logs, and filter entries based on the correlation ID that you find in the error message you’ll get in your browser. For a very good description of how to use the ULS log viewer to troubleshoot by ID, review this excellent blog entry.
Once you’ve run a filter on the correlation ID as described in the blog entry above, you’re probably going to find that the real error message you’re seeing is something along the lines of “Feature {GUID} for list template ‘xxx’ is not installed on this farm”. Replace the GUID with the GUID of pretty much any non-standard Sharepoint feature.
If you’ve had a lot of features added on to your Sharepoint 2007 environment over time, you’re likely to find more than one of these errors in your log file. One of the main causes of these errors are sites that have been built in 2007 based on any one of the “Fantastic 40″ Application templates provided by Microsoft to enhance Sharepoint 2007 functionality.
Unfortunately, these “Fantastic 40″ aren’t all that “fantastic” when they break your 2010 environment from the start. The templates and lists created by them by default simply don’t exist in 2010 out of the box, and trying to load a site based on them is going to cause problems.
To get around the problem, download the “AllTemplates.exe” from this link, and run the executable on your Sharepoint 2010 server. This will extract all of the custom application templates created for MOSS 2007 to your 2010 server. Once they’ve been extracted, you’re going to be interested in the file named “ApplicationCore.wsp”.
Navigate to your Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared Services\Web Service Extensions\14\BIN directory and run:
stsadm -o addsolution -filename c:\templates\ApplicationTemplateCore.wsp
stsadm -o deploysolution -name ApplicationTemplateCore.wsp -local -allowgacdeployment
This will deploy the core custom application template functionality to your 2010 environment, allowing you to open and reconfigure sites based on these custom templates as needed, without disrupting any of the functionality of your 2010 environment.
Voila – you should be good to go now. Good luck.
