The trial period for this product has expired. Trial Period? WTH?

I lurve SharePoint 2010, I really do, but the learning curve on this release is starting to look like a vertical line, and there is still very little documentation on the product. <casts a glaring eye towards Redmond> I once again found myself encountering an annoying error on another SharePoint 2010 deployment that I should not have seen; something that comes up on every SharePoint 2010 install I have seen or done myself.

Uhm, whut? I did not install a trial version. I specifically remember keying in the software key during install. WTH Microsoft? I didn’t install Foundation anyway, I installed the full Enterprise package. Oh, and please stop including links in your error messages that don’t help at all…it is even more frustrating to think help is a click away only to be smacked down, than to just look at a cryptic error that tells you nothing useful.

I can not tell you why this happens, or what the “MS sanctioned” way to fix this is. What I can tell you is how to get past it, which I have done personally a few times, and have seen online as recommend by several other SharePoint bloggers with WAY more experience than I…which is exactly why I am blogging this. They have so much more experience that their directions are all, while probably perfectly clear to a SharePoint guru, just opaque enough to make me feel stupid. Rather than pass that along to you, dear readers, I thought to spell this out in steps that even I can follow, since I know I will need this again in a couple of months.

To fix this issue, we need to add the domain account that is used to run SharePoint’s application pool to the local administrators group on the SharePoint server. This will cause the SharePoint Health Analyser to alert you about a critical issue. Of course, to me anyway, being completely unable to use SharePoint is a more critical issue.

If you are cool with that too, here is how to proceed.

1. Log on to your SharePoint server and launch the IIS Management console.
2. Browse down to Application Pools.
   
3. Find the application pool for your SharePoint site.
4. Note the domain account that is listed as the Identity for the application pool used by SharePoint.
5. Launch Server Manager, browse down to Configuration, Local Groups, and add that account to the local administrators group on the server.
   
6. Open an administrative cmd prompt, and enter this command.
   

   iisreset [enter]

7. Your application pool account now has the power to get past this flaky little issue.

Try to access SharePoint again…you should be good to go. While making the account used by the Application Pool a local administrator gets you passed this issue, it is obviously not the best long term solution out there. When I find the proper fix, I will update this post, but if you happen to get there before me, please, leave a comment. And since we just gave a service account the power, picture if you will the little cyber-dude dancing around in the non-paged pool of your SharePoint server.

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