Recently I had to activate the publishing infrastucture on a new MOSS 2007 site. On other sites this always worked before, but now I was getting ‘Access Denied’ when activating the ‘Server Publishing Infrastructure’ at this client.
To solve the ‘Access Denied’ problem I found you need to elevate the permissions of the AppPool of the web application on which you are trying to activate the Publishing Infrastructure feature.
One way to achieve this is to temporarily change the AppPool of the web application.
1. Open IIS Admin.
2. Location the Web Site for your web application.
3. Goto to the properties and select the ‘Home Directory’ tab.
4. Change the AppPool to be the same as Central Administration.
5. IISRESET
6. Activate the Publishing Infrastructure feature on your site.
7. Change to AppPool back to the original.
8. IISRESET.
This should allow you to enable the feature and use the publishing features within MOSS.