How do I – Resolve the issue where the Term Store Management option does not show up in Site Settings for a SharePoint site

A friend of mine pinged me the other day asking about the Term Store. The problem he was seeing was that the “Term store management” link wasn’t showing up under the Site Administration section of the site. He had another site in the same web application that did show the link so the question was why this site did not show the link. When looking at the Site Settings page for the site in question, we

saw this:  Wondering if this was another of SharePoint’s hide-and-seek games (like hiding the Delete Site link), I entered the direct URL to the Term Store into my browser. The direct URL is located as /_Layouts/termstoremanager.aspx Of course, I did not get the Term Store, but instead was confronted with the wonderful CorrelationID page. Nonetheless, now that I had a CorrelationID, I had a log I could look to for more information. Upon inspection of the ULS log file, this is what I found:

05/30/2012 09:40:26.47 w3wp.exe (0x3AE4) 0x35E0     SharePoint Foundation  Logging Correlation Data  xmnv  Medium      Name=Request (GET:http://workspaces.crayveon.com:80/ZBI/_Layouts/termstoremanager.aspx)  a7de1d35-c1ba-467b-9099-492693dcd124
05/30/2012 09:40:26.83 w3wp.exe (0x3AE4) 0x35E0     SharePoint Foundation  Logging Correlation Data  xmnv  Medium      Site=/ws/ZBI  a7de1d35-c1ba-467b-9099-492693dcd124
05/30/2012 09:40:26.95 w3wp.exe (0x3AE4) 0x35E0     SharePoint Foundation  Runtime                   tkau  Unexpected  System.InvalidOperationException: The Taxonomy feature (Feature ID "73EF14B1-13A9-416b-A9B5-ECECA2B0604C") has not been activated.
    at Microsoft.SharePoint.Taxonomy.OM.CodeBehind.TermStoreManager.OnLoad(EventArgs e)     at System.Web.UI.Control.LoadRecursive()     at System.Web.UI.Page.ProcessRequestMain(Boolean includeStagesBeforeAsyncPoint, Boolean includeStagesAfterAsyncPoint)    a7de1d35-c1ba-467b-9099-492693dcd124
05/30/2012 09:40:26.97 w3wp.exe (0x3AE4) 0x35E0     SharePoint Foundation  Monitoring                b4ly  Medium      Leaving Monitored Scope (Request (GET:http://workspaces.crayveon.com:80/ZBI/_Layouts/termstoremanager.aspx)). Execution Time=501.213422376308    a7de1d35-c1ba-467b-9099-492693dcd124

As always, the most important line is the first one of type “Unexpected” following the first reference of your CorrelationID. In this case, the issue is easily identified as: The Taxonomy feature (Feature ID “73EF14B1-13A9-416b-A9B5-ECECA2B0604C”) has not been activated. Now the solution was easy, right? Simply activate the Taxonomy Feature on the site or site collection and you’re all set.Not so fast… The Taxonomy Feature is a hidden Feature. As such, this Feature is activated via the Taxonomy Feature Stapler which is attached with most site templates. The keyword is MOST. This stapler is NOT attached to the BLANK SITE TEMPLATE. The reason for this is because there’s a site attribute called “AllowGlobalFeatureAssociations” which is set to false on blank site templates. Because of this, the Feature Stapler will not fire upon the creation of the blank site and as a result, Taxonomy will not work on the site. So how do we solve that? Unfortunately, you’re going to need console access which is a problem for hosted environments such as SharePoint Online in Office 365. If however you have rights and access to your server, it can easily be done through the following Powershell cmdlet:

Enable-SPFeature -identity "73EF14B1-13A9-416b-A9B5-ECECA2B0604C" -url 

Of course if you're still old school and want to use STSADM, you can still do that by using this command:

STSADM -o activatefeature -id "73EF14B1-13A9-416b-A9B5-ECECA2B0604C" -url  –force

Once you’ve activated the Feature, a refresh of the Site Administration page shows:

Cheers
C