An unexpected error has occurred when trying to create an Enterprise Search Center in SharePoint 2010

I thought I’m getting crazy with the above meaningless error message.

I tried to create an Enterprise Search Center within a site collection in SharePoint 2010. But I’ve received this error message all the time. I’ve also tried to create a new site collection, but without success.

Suddenly I had the idea to try it with SharePoint Designer. And voila, I’ve got an error message I can work with.

So the next step was to enable the Publishing Infrastructure feature. Site Actions -> Site Settings -> Site collection features -> SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure and click on “Activate”

After this step you can also create the Enterprise Search Center without any error messages 🙂